David Cameron rushed home as rioting spread

August 11, 2011:

Vacationing Cameron Rushed Home to Regain Control as Riots Struck London
By Eddie Buckle and Robert Hutton
Bloomberg

Prime Minister David Cameron and London Mayor Boris Johnson, caught on foreign vacations as the worst rioting since the 1980s hit the British capital, were forced to rush home to reassert order and fend off criticism.

Outbreaks of looting and arson started on Aug. 6 in the north London suburb of Tottenham and spread across the city the following night. It wasn’t until a third evening of disorder began that Cameron broke off his holiday in Italy to return to his Downing Street office. Johnson was in Canada when the rioters struck.

“Being away, particularly being away in Tuscany, when things are kicking off at home doesn’t look great, and you have to come back,” Philip Cowley, professor of politics at Nottingham University, said in an interview. “The really important thing is what you do when you get back.”

Cameron convened a meeting of the government’s emergency response committee at his Downing Street office, recalled Parliament and more than doubled the number of police on London’s streets. The tactic worked as officers fanned out across the capital, preventing a fourth night of arson and looting.

Summer Recess

Home Secretary Theresa May returned to the U.K. a few hours before Cameron. Other Cabinet ministers, including Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, were also out of the country. Foreign Secretary William Hague was the senior minister in London last week, and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg was scheduled to take over this week, as politicians took advantage of Parliament’s summer recess and the school holidays to spend time with their children.

Cameron and Osborne had already broken into their vacation time last week as the euro-area debt crisis worsened and Standard & Poor’s downgraded U.S. debt. Cameron spoke to Bank of England Governor Mervyn King and German Chancellor Angela Merkel from Italy on Aug. 5, while Osborne kept in contact with fellow finance ministers and International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde from California.

When August comes around, British government departments slim down their operations. A duty minister in each remains in London to deal with any urgent developments.

‘Never on Holiday’

“You are never on holiday when you are doing these jobs,” the economic secretary to the Treasury, Justine Greening, told BBC television last week, as she held the reins at Osborne’s finance ministry. “The prime minister and the chancellor are fully in control and aware of exactly what is happening.”

She was speaking after the Daily Mirror newspaper accused Cameron and Osborne of having “Gone AWOL” as billions of pounds were wiped off the value of pension funds and workers lost their jobs.

John Prescott, the deputy prime minister in Tony Blair’s Labour government, was also critical of the lack of co- ordination in ministers’ vacation plans.

“People think August is a quiet time. It isn’t,” Prescott told BBC television on Aug. 7.

Johnson, a member of Cameron’s Conservative Party who is seeking re-election as mayor next year, described how he saw pictures of the rioting as he waited in the departure lounge of Calgary Airport for a plane home.

“I waited to catch a plane, and as the images of a blazing London filled the screen I felt a series of emotions,” the mayor said in a statement Aug. 8. “I felt a sickening sense of incredulity that this could really be happening in our city. I felt a blinding anger at the callousness and selfishness of the rioters.”

Heckled in Clapham

On his return, Johnson was heckled as he went to visit people attempting to clean up after looting in the southwest London district of Clapham Junction. He struggled to make himself heard above the noise as he tried to apologize for the damage.

As the catcalls increased, the home secretary, who’d gone to the area with him, could be seen moving out of the view of television cameras. The mayor later posed for photographs smiling as he wielded a broom.

“Boris has been damaged, not just by being on holiday but by his behavior when he got back,” Cowley said. The mayor will be facing his predecessor, Labour’s Ken Livingstone, in the election next May.