Cameron: Practically a Conservative

Cameron: Practically a Conservative
Francis Elliott

James Hanning

A fully updated edition of Cameron: The Rise of the New Conservative, the first major biography of David Cameron, and now covering his first years as Prime Minister and leader of the coalition government.David Cameron is the first Conservative Prime Minister in a generation, and also the first leader of a coalition government for eighty years. But what is the reality behind his brand of repackaged Conservatism? And who is Cameron the man?Here, for the first time, is an independent examination of the ‘saviour’ of the Conservative Party and the life that brought him to Number 10 Downing Street. Based on extensive interviews with his closest friends, his most senior lieutenants and his critics, it traces his meteoric rise from an idyllic, privileged childhood, to the heart of government by the age of 25, to leader of the country.Critical and insightful by turn, this updated edition now covers Cameron’s first year as Prime Minister – a time that has seen unprecedented scandal in the political world, as well as challenges unique to the Conservative leader.

Cameron

The Rise of the New Conservative

Francis Elliott & James Hanning

London, New York, Toronto, Sydney and New Delhi

To Jane and Emma

Table of Contents

Cover Page (#u52e9475e-0352-59cb-9636-83eab35124ee)

Title Page (#u5adae458-b021-5fae-9783-18fa573bd1ff)

Dedication (#u59f57b62-2d13-57ea-93c0-892c26cc5cc1)

Peasemore A Berkshire Boyhood 1966–1973 (#u77c916c5-9151-517e-ae04-df4864f780e9)

Heatherdown Prep school 1974–1979 (#ubf7b2cbe-d219-5c23-8535-9aefaa498c68)

Eton Public school 1979–1984 (#u7393d9d9-5017-5e47-8088-104e211a5d52)

Oxford University 1985–1988 (#u987a6a58-a1c5-57be-bcf2-734345c038a0)

Smith Square Conservative Research Department 1988–1992 (#ud9b9ddde-1b83-5ef4-a7db-7c24b93bdb50)

Gayfere Street General election campaign 1992 (#u8c473014-deea-5196-8cbc-a0ef620fba6c)

11 Downing Street Treasury 1992–1993 (#litres_trial_promo)

Tuscany Romance 1992 (#litres_trial_promo)

Queen Anne’S Gate Home Office 1993–1994 (#litres_trial_promo)

St George Street Carlton Communications 1994–1997 (#litres_trial_promo)

Knightsbridge Carlton Communications 1997–2001 (#litres_trial_promo)

Witney Member of Parliament 2001–2003 (#litres_trial_promo)

Ivan Firstborn (#litres_trial_promo)

Finstock Road Preparing for the election 2003–2005 (#litres_trial_promo)

Blackpool Leadership election 2005 (#litres_trial_promo)

Norman Shaw South Leader of the Opposition 2005–2007 (#litres_trial_promo)

Millbank Leader of the Opposition 2007– (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)

Notes (#litres_trial_promo)

Index (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Praise (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

PEASEMORE A Berkshire boyhood 1966–1973 (#ulink_485e07ce-b43a-559b-afeb-41c616cf17c5)

‘So let a message go out from this conference.’ David Cameron paused, letting his audience know that he was building towards a dramatic conclusion. ‘A modern compassionate Conservatism is right for our times, right for our party – and right for our country. If we go for it, if we seize it, if we fight for it with every ounce of passion, vigour and energy from now until the next election, nothing and no one can stop us.’

For a moment the Empress Ballroom in Blackpool’s Winter Gardens seemed bleached out by the photographers’ xenon flashes rippling round the hall as if synchronised with the sudden roar of approval. The applause intensified when the candidate was joined on stage by his wife Samantha, then pregnant with the couple’s third child. Her pregnancy gave the photographers a powerful image to illustrate his message that the time had arrived for a ‘new generation of Conservatives’. The cheering delegates (#litres_trial_promo) may not have known that that line owed a good deal to John F. Kennedy. But they believed that the Tories had found their own young saviour.

Cameron’s speech to the Conservative Party conference on 4 October 2005 launched him into public consciousness and set him on course for victory in the party’s leadership election. Its success took almost everyone by surprise. Even his most senior allies had not realised until a few days before how charismatic he could be. Indeed there had been some discussion about whether he should pull out of the race and declare his support for David Davis, who was then the firm favourite. But Cameron wanted a chance to perform on what was, at that point, the biggest stage of his career. He was confident that he could deliver a powerful speech. The newspaper headlines on 5 October confirmed that he was right. It turned out to be a speech of such momentum-creating power as to carry him over the finishing line a winner.

Reflecting on his sudden burst from the rear of the leadership field to its front, a former colleague said: ‘Like all political overnight sensations, it was twenty years in the making.’ This is the story of the making of David Cameron – of how, as one of his friends put it, Cameron climbed ‘floor by floor’ to the top of the Conservative Party. It was an ascent achieved by hard work and intelligence, but it also benefited from luck and the efforts of others. This is the story, too, of a childhood spent in an England that barely exists any more. Cameron’s was a world (#litres_trial_promo) first of nannies and matrons, then of beaks and boys’ maids. But his privilege is peculiar not so much for its material as for its emotional wealth. He likes to say that he is an optimist, and the man whom he credits with instilling in him that quality is his father.

David Cameron’s great-great-grandfather Ewen left Scotland early in Queen Victoria’s reign and started his business career, in the mid-nineteenth century, in the Far East, working for the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank. Having become a director, he eventually returned to London to manage the bank, and was knighted for his services. His son, David Cameron’s great-grandfather, was Ewen Alan Cameron, who rose to become senior partner of stockbrokers Panmure Gordon. He lived partly at Blairmore Castle, near Huntly in Aberdeenshire (originally a family home of his wife, Rachel Geddes) and partly in London. They had four children, one of whom was Donald Cameron, born in 1906. At the age of twenty-six, Donald (#litres_trial_promo) – who followed his father in becoming a partner of Panmure Gordon – married Enid Agnes Maud Levita. Two years later, on 12 October 1932, when they were living at 25 Chesham Street, SW1, their only son Ian was born.

The bald facts of Ian Cameron’s early life might not be expected to encourage the development of a positive outlook. In the language of the day he was born a cripple, his legs severely deformed from the knees downwards. A bout of German measles during his mother’s confinement was blamed, incorrectly, at the time, but the cause remains obscure. Its effect was to shorten his legs below the knee and twist his feet, one of which had three toes, the other four. He had a series of operations in very early infancy to provide some relief to the problem – although after the age of three he was never particularly in pain – and straighten his legs, but while the rest of him suggests a man of about six foot two, he is actually about a foot shorter than that.

The young Ian was sent away to boarding school, wearing specially adapted shoes. He went first to Betteshanger School in Kent, where, because of his disability, he was made to have an extra hour’s rest every day. At home, in London during the holidays, his mother treated him with a great deal of affection but also with some firmness. She believed that the effect of his disability had to be minimised, that he had to do as much as possible for himself. Friends say it was from her that he acquired much of his tough-mindedness and independence. To this day he feels (#litres_trial_promo) in her debt for pushing him beyond what, at the time, he thought he was physically capable of doing.

By the time Ian Cameron was preparing to go to Eton he suffered another blow – his father left his mother and married an aristocratic Austrian. Marielen von Meiss-Teuffen had been born in 1918 in Attersee near Linz, Austria, and was sent, while still a teenager, first to France and then to Britain. When she met Donald Cameron in wartime London, she was working as an announcer for the BBC having already divorced her first husband Reginald Critchley, with whom she had had a daughter, Verena. Now in her late eighties and living in a nursing home in Vienna, Marielen says that at first Enid Cameron was friendly and ‘didn’t mind me being around’. When the exact nature of her husband’s relationship with her was revealed it was clearly a painful shock. ‘You can imagine what (#litres_trial_promo) the woman must have felt to realise her husband was in love with another woman.’ While Donald Cameron and his new wife set up home in Clareville Grove, Kensington, his son was left to support his mother. It was a lonely, difficult and formative time for Ian Cameron.

The failure of Enid Levita’s marriage may have prompted her to reflect on the shame of her grandmother, Lady Agnes Duff, who was shunned in society following two elopements and a divorce. Agnes, David Cameron’s forebear, eventually took refuge in nursing. It was there that she met and married Dr Alfred Cooper, a specialist in sexual ailments. (Cooper used to claim (#litres_trial_promo) that between them he and his wife were acquainted with the private parts of all the peers in London.) Agnes’s parents were the 5th Earl of Fife and Lady Agnes Hay, but her most noteworthy relative from the more recent past was one of her four children, Duff Cooper, who became Sir Winston Churchill’s Minister of Information during the Second World War and whose beautiful wife Diana aroused such admiration. The philandering Duff Cooper was thus Ian Cameron’s great-uncle (although they never met). He was also, like Ian Cameron, a chairman of White’s, the men-only club in St James’s. David Cameron has expressed relief (#litres_trial_promo) that he has not inherited Duff Cooper’s remarkable appetite for wine and women.

Donald Cameron did not cope well with having a disabled son, and it has been said he did not encourage Ian to believe that he would be joining him at Panmure Gordon, where he was a senior partner. Had the father seen more of his son at Eton he might have revised his opinion. Ian Cameron did not shine academically at school, but his peers learned not to underestimate his determination. A lifelong friend (#litres_trial_promo) Ben Glazebrook remembers playing a rumbustious game of indoor football in a corridor at Eton. ‘I had the ball at my feet…and I said “Oh yes, this is Ian, I can get past him.” Suddenly my wrists were seized in an iron grip by Ian, because all the strength of his legs had gone into his arms and wrists. I virtually needed a course of physiotherapy after that. He had this amazing strength, and he was always incredibly resilient, courageous and outgoing. He’d never been shy, and he was always very open. He said, “I can do everything except ski,” which I think he regretted.’ He also enjoyed cricket and tennis, and at Eton, when he took part in the Field Game, the school’s own soccer–rugby hybrid, he played in a position comparable to scrumhalf, where, on occasions, a low centre of gravity can be an advantage.

Leaving school in 1951, Ian Cameron made a decision he later came to regret. Perhaps conscious of the need for a remunerative career, instead of going to university he decided to train as an accountant. While professionally useful, he found it less than entertaining (and was to forbid his children to enter the profession). Having qualified, he spent two years as a banker at Robert Fleming before joining Panmure Gordon, where he worked exceptionally hard to overcome the stigma that some had attached to his physique, and in 1957 emulated his father and grandfather in becoming a partner. He was, he admitted privately, a ‘nepotistic heir’. Socially Ian Cameron was no less determined to triumph over his disability. He moved out of his mother’s house in Lowndes Square, near Harrods, into a flat of his own round the corner in Basil Street. ‘Ian was always incredibly social,’ remembers Glazebrook, who lived near by. ‘He used to have endless parties with the most beautiful girls.’

In 1958 Donald Cameron died, leaving an estate valued at £57,408 (worth £928,000 today) and an inheritance that enabled his son to consider marriage. When the charming Mr Cameron set out to woo her, Mary Mount saw not deformity in him but spirit. He threw himself around the dance floor with the same gusto with which he had played football. The couple married on 20 October 1962, two days before Mary’s twenty-eighth birthday. It might have surprised his father that Ian Cameron married so well, into a family that has belonged to the British Establishment since long before that phrase was coined. Tall, stately and sure of herself, Mary is a typical Mount. From the beginning she had two qualities that her friends and family most admire in her now – compassion and common sense – and she is typical too for having served as a magistrate for over thirty years, as her mother and grandmother did before her.