I arrived at Downing Street half an hour before Nick Clegg – two colleagues and I the only familiar faces among a sea of strangers waiting to welcome him behind the famous black door. Everything about those first weeks was hyper-real. There is always something strange about being in a place you know well from TV, but have never been to. Trying to work in such a place sometimes feels like you might be acting on a film set. For me and my Liberal Democrat colleagues it was particularly disorienting because, let’s face it, nobody joins the Lib Dems with the expectation they’ll end up in government.
The moment when reality dawned was the last evening of the coalition negotiations. My colleague and I were waiting for taxis home at nearly midnight, after the formal coalition agreement was published. He’d handled questions from the press with his usual flair, and then got another call, this time from the Treasury, that surprised him. They wanted his input on anti-forestalling measures to prevent tax avoidance in the light of our announcement of a rise in capital gains tax. The shift from making policy in opposition couldn’t have felt clearer: theory was no longer enough. This was real.
The civil service were as shocked to have Lib Dems in the building as we were to be there. A senior leader told me they’d done war games before the election to see how coalition talks would play out, and concluded that a Lib Dem-Tory coalition was the only impossible outcome. A big office was found for Nick in 70 Whitehall – one that had been earmarked for the new national security adviser, who had to move upstairs. It had some anterooms, some desks, but, crucially, almost no staff. The cabinet secretary gave us his own principal private secretary, who obligingly found someone who could find me a notebook and a pen. Computers and emails took longer. An actual civil service team to support this constitutional anomaly of a deputy prime minister took years to get up to strength. I did get a plum office myself, near the cabinet room and with a view of the garden, because I signed up to share with Cameron’s infamous adviser Steve Hilton. The smugness wore off a little one day when Ken Clarke charged through the door, without knocking, and stopped abruptly on seeing me. “Oh, this used to be where we put the coats,” he said.
The biggest challenge moving into government was the volume of work. Everyone in politics works hard, and election campaigns are gruelling, but we’d all expected to take a break after polling day. I had a wedding booked for that autumn and had deferred most of the organising until after the election. The break never came: in fact, the work stepped up a gear. There were days when I wouldn’t get around to eating, until I realised I could take advantage of the endless receptions held in the state rooms. Canapes make a balanced diet if you eat enough of them. The orders of service for my wedding were – I’m sorry to confess – produced on a Downing Street printer two days before the ceremony. None of the hard work bothered me. The struggle was emotional. The job sounds the same but couldn’t be more different. I thought I knew everything about our policies but, suddenly, the scale of what I didn’t know was overwhelming. It was humbling, which is good for the soul, but painful. I and my fellow policy advisers had to learn to do a new job while doing it, with no training, no handbook, and only a shared determination to live up to our new responsibilities. Mingling over coffee before one of the first coalition cabinet meetings, I overheard Theresa May being asked if she was enjoying being home secretary. “I’m glad I’m doing it,” she replied. It’s a great line: I used it a lot. Politics is a game, and it’s fun to play. But governing isn’t a game. It’s less fun, and so it should be. Polly Mackenzie was director of policy for Nick Clegg from 2010 to 2015