Cameron: Practically a Conservative

In those early weeks, the sense of sharing an ordeal binds young boys together. They would exchange notes about Eton’s curious rituals, which parts of the town are out of bounds, the agony of starched collars and the impenetrability of Eton argot. These and other topics would be kicked around in a ‘mess’, a ritual of considerable seriousness – for the youngest at least – in which boys form groups of three or four and meet every afternoon in the room of one of them for comforting quantities of tea and toast.

Friends who remember Cameron from that time say he adapted well to his new school. He was good company, placid, with a ready wit, invaluable for keeping bullies at bay – just as he had done at Heatherdown. He had made the step up from being a big fish at his prep school to being a minnow at Eton with no obvious difficulty, reticence or homesickness. One master recalls: ‘He wasn’t a shy or retiring person, even in F, just a pleasant personality, a very natural, basically happy person.’ Another new boy, pointing out how everyone treads on eggshells in their first term, remembers Cameron coming up to him and asking ‘What’s your name? (#litres_trial_promo)’ The boy nervously gave his surname, to which Cameron replied, ‘No, I mean your Christian name. I’m David.’ ‘He was just being friendly. It struck me as being incredibly personable and human and level headed of him,’ says the boy in question. ‘He clearly wasn’t fazed by the place at all.’

But, with the onset of adolescence, some began to find his natural buoyancy verging on the bumptious. Someone who met him one school holiday around that time said he was ‘a typical Etonian, rather full of himself, and nothing like as funny as he thought himself’. The mother of an associate of his reports that she was told by the rather over-assured young man that ‘women have the intellectual span of a gnat’. By his early teens, he was inclined to have the odd furtive cigarette with his friends, and they would nip behind the cricket pavilion for an excited swig of beer or wine. He told friends then that he preferred to be called Dave, presumably because it sounded cooler. Although an early girlfriend, Caroline Graham, now the Mail on Sunday’s Los Angeles correspondent, says he was shy, she remembers Cameron as an ‘expert kisser’ at the age of thirteen. Cameron has no recollection of this, and wonders if she was thinking of his brother.

He showed artistic leanings in his early years at Eton, and spent a good deal of time at the Art Schools. The master in charge was John Booth, described by a widely experienced figure at the school as ‘unquestionably the finest art teacher I’ve dealt with in my career’. Cameron had some etchings displayed at the school’s open day, the Fourth of June. He dabbled a bit in painting, and allowed his foot to be made into a plaster cast, for the art show of his talented sculptor friend Crispin Gibbs (with the toe as a spout), but – while studying for around five hours a week – principally enjoyed the relaxed ambience of creativity and exchange of ideas that Booth encouraged. ‘It was a really nice community of people, slightly apart from the school,’ remembers Booth, who inspired a marked increase in the number of boys taking O-level Art.

‘The facilities were superb, and John Booth ran a really beneficial regime,’ says one regular there. ‘He encouraged us to paint big, to have ambitious ideas. The building was new, with big plate-glass windows looking out, and he didn’t just want staid public schoolboys’ art, he wanted to encourage young investigative artists to try out new things.’ It was characteristic that Booth encouraged one boy to paint a forty-foot-high crucifix. His alumni in the early 1980s included Jay Jopling, who went on to create the White Cube Gallery, Max Wigram, who now runs a contemporary art gallery in central London, Nick Fiddian-Green, a sculptor, Dominic Ramos, a watercolourist, and John Martin, another gallery owner in central London. BritArt had many fathers, but John Booth could reasonably claim to have been at least an uncle.

Cameron played sports – one contemporary described him as the rock of an unglamorous house team – but not to a high enough standard to represent the school. His best sport was tennis, which he had played extensively on the court at home. He was a stylish and forceful player, and came close to getting into the school’s second team. Lyttelton, who had briefly taught him French and tennis, remembers Cameron, above all, as an extremely social creature. ‘It is no effort at all to remember him. Some boys tend to hide, but he was the sort who would say, “Do you remember, Sir, you taught me French in F,” not in a pushy way, but simply out of natural friendliness.’ He says that teachers often have a certain trepidation about whether a group they are in charge of will ‘gel’. ‘Sometimes,’ he says, ‘the reason it does can be ascribed to one particular individual. I remember David Cameron (with gratitude) as one of these: no group, in schoolroom or on tennis court, of which he was a member failed to gel in the happiest possible way.’ Michael Kidson, who taught him History, agrees. ‘I recall an easy, civil, courteous, intelligent and vigilant young man,’ but not ‘conspicuously a high-flyer’.

By the start of 1982 Cameron was studying for his O-levels that summer, the grades of which would determine whether he would be allowed to stay at the school. He had not yet shone academically, so the threat of his Eton career ending in failure was not a remote one. But just six weeks before the exams Cameron came close to being expelled before he could even sit them.

Towards the end of May a number of pupils were found to be both using and distributing cannabis. The affair made the national newspapers, in part because, unusually, the police were involved. Eton generally told the local drugs squad of any illegality the school had uncovered and the drugs squad in turn was content to leave the school to sort it out. On this occasion the police oversaw an investigation by the school, apparently determined, at least at first, to root out all drug-users. The initial culprits were called upon to reveal to whom they had sold drugs, an offence that ensured automatic expulsion. On the first day seven were summarily thrown out and the investigation began to snowball.

‘They called in more the next day, and the day after, but after that everyone just clammed up,’ says one former pupil who left that term. ‘A couple of the guys were going to Slough to buy the stuff, but it wasn’t as if there was real dealing going on in the school.’ He added: ‘We were heavily leaned on to give names. There were a lot of people involved. They tried to accuse me of dealing in it, which was nonsense. I told the headmaster, “If you kick me out, you’ll have to kick an awful lot of people out.” I didn’t like the way it was handled. We weren’t told our rights or anything, and apart from a few confessions from people, they had very little evidence.’ A senior member of staff at the time admits that a ‘nice teacher, nasty teacher’ technique was used, and says: ‘I have no doubt that we wouldn’t be allowed to handle it in the same way nowadays – we would be involved with human rights legislation and so on.’ Estimates vary of how many were questioned, but the school was anxious to send a strong signal, including to those on the fringes who had experimented but otherwise knew little of the drugs world. The school authorities, evidently, were taken aback by what they found. ‘They realised the numbers were much greater than they thought,’ claimed one former pupil. ‘They couldn’t rusticate [temporarily expel] everybody.’ While, in theory at least, the ‘hard nuts’ were thrown out, others received milder punishments.

JF was on the edge of Eton, with views out over the countryside and towards the railway arches, both domains offering handy cover for illicit smoking and drinking. From the house, it was possible on occasion to witness the surreal scene of groups of two or three teenagers in tailcoats trudging back towards the school, their purported interest in the botany of east Berkshire temporarily sated. Cameron’s house was a stone’s throw from the Art Schools, and the drugs purge took a disproportionate toll on those who attended them. (Much later, the headmaster gently pointed out to John Booth that three-quarters of the boys who were expelled did Art; Booth replied jovially that all of them did Divinity, but that proved nothing.) ‘It was a group of pretty naughty characters and they tended to get into trouble,’ said another regular visitor to the railway arches who was expelled. He remembers the drugs clean-up as being ‘like a military operation’ and still resents what he sees as its draconian enforcement and the suspicion (about who gave names to the headmaster) it created.

In the inquisition of May 1982, an acquaintance of David Cameron named him as having smoked cannabis. He was called before the headmaster and confessed. Because he had only smoked and not sold the drugs he was not thrown out. Instead he was fined, gated (refused all leave) and given a Georgic (a classic Eton punishment requiring the offender to copy out 500 lines of Latin). To acute personal embarrassment, he was barred from attending the Fourth of June celebrations. He was also invited to reveal the names of other boys involved but did not do so. Eric Anderson (now Sir Eric, and provost of Eton), who did not become one of Eton’s most popular former headmasters by small-mindedly remembering every misdemeanour he has been called upon to punish, says he does not recall Cameron’s involvement, but makes a general point. ‘There are those who get in on the fringes. It is a matter of excitement and experimentation. We would have said, “Let’s get the ringleaders,” and if there were others involved, we would have scared them off from doing it again. We’re dealing with young boys, and young boys sometimes do silly things. But I would very much resist the idea that we “put the lid back” on anything.’

The incident was all but forgotten when twenty-three years later Cameron stood on the brink of the Tory leadership. A discussion took place about whether to allow a friendly journalist to break the story so that it wouldn’t fester and fall into hostile hands to be revealed at an embarrassing moment, but Cameron decided against answering any questions about his drugs use. It was a decision that has brought enduring innuendo about alleged cocaine use but one that has ensured that, while he may have inhaled cannabis, no ‘drugs lies’ have left his lips.

Typically, he did not allow the drugs episode to get him down. Happy, well adjusted, social but academically average (although he surprised himself by passing twelve O-levels, with moderate grades), Cameron’s Eton career appeared to be pottering into an agreeable obscurity in the summer of 1982. His tastes were not untypical. He had a poster of the American model Cheryl Tiegs on the wall of his room and enjoyed the Jam (whose ‘Eton Rifles’ had come out in his first term), Stiff Little Fingers and XTC and developed an interest in the drums. Like so many schoolchildren with excess energy to burn off, he would tap rhythmically on his desk before classes began. A friend at the time remembers him having a coltish obsession with the distinctive drum break in the middle of Phil Collins’s 1981 single ‘Something in the Air Tonight’, and decided that playing air drums to it was not enough. With characteristic gusto, he went so far as to take lessons. His drum teacher Steve Lees has no recollection of his having formed or joined a band, though.

Despite this amiable pottering, something remarkable was to happen over the next two years that propelled him out of the ranks towards the front. An awakening interest in politics, a steely ambition and an academic facility flowered in him, seemingly simultaneously, just in time for his A-levels. Not for the last time in his life, he suddenly burst from the pack when the prize was in view.

From C block, which he reached in September 1982, onwards, boys are known as ‘specialists’. Becoming a specialist is akin to reaching adulthood, and it marks the point when boys are permitted to drink, in moderation, at Tap, the school pub; they are also allowed more weekends away from the school. By this time Cameron’s brother had gone on to Bristol University, but he would go back to Peasemore, often seeing his sisters Tania – then heading for A-levels at St Mary’s, Calne, in Berkshire – and Clare – who was still at the Manor prep school in Abingdon – as well as his parents. Cameron, as he says himself (#litres_trial_promo), didn’t really ‘get going academically’ until he started doing A-levels. He was now beyond the reach of those set subjects required by the Eton curriculum and he could follow his own interests more closely. He chose as his three A-levels History of Art, History and Economics with Politics. It is at this stage, perhaps, that the benefits of Eton come to the fore. Cameron was fortunate to be taught History of Art by William Franklin, undoubtedly one of the school’s stars, and Bill Winter, the convivial organiser of the Political Society. He was taught History by Giles St Aubyn and Michael Kidson, a kindly and scholarly man, whose faux pomposity endeared him to generations of Etonians. But it was his enthusiasm for Economics (and Politics) that really fed his academic appetite.

As a specialist, a boy is free to choose the Tutor who will see him through to A-levels, with whom he would share twice-weekly informal private business sessions. As before, these sessions, often just ‘talking things through’, as one master puts it, were not oriented towards exams but were designed to give boys a taste for off-curriculum culture at its broadest. John Clark, who taught Cameron for his last four terms, sees private business as one of the keys to what might be called ‘the Eton experience’. ‘The school is remarkably informal,’ he says, ‘despite the exterior that the outside world sees. It gives tremendous opportunities to talk and discuss and be taken seriously by adults, and private business is a case in point.’

Cameron chose as his Tutor Tim Young, an Etonian himself, who ran the school’s First XI soccer team. Paradoxically, although Young himself had been a scholar (remarkably, the fourth in what is now a family line of five to win a King’s scholarship), his reputation among the boys was as much for gregariousness as for academic excellence. ‘Tim Young is very nice,’ says one gifted contemporary. ‘It shows Cameron wasn’t at that stage very academically ambitious. Of all the choices you make at that age, it’s one of the more revealing ones about who you are. I imagine he chose him as much because he was a good bloke as anything else.’

Yet Tim Young remembers Cameron on the launchpad: ‘What I saw was the start of a developing of the considerable academic motor that took him on to Oxford. Physically and mentally he took off in the sixth form. He was beginning to discover that he had a potential which people had never identified.’ John Clark agrees: ‘He was very much a late developer academically, one who came good once he did a series of subjects that suited him. He didn’t make a great splash at Eton, but of all the people I taught he was one of the most impressive. What is striking is that his subject choices, History, History of Art and Economics, might have been thought as relatively light by some universities. But they didn’t stop him doing very well.’

In the spring of 1983, two masters took a party of twenty-six boys to Rome to help them with their Art History studies. When such a group is let loose on a foreign jaunt, good behaviour is not a priority. For much of the trip, while most of the boys saw the sights, David Cameron was immobile, having sprained his ankle dancing overenthusiastic reels to the bagpipe-playing of his friend Ben Weatherall. ‘[He] was busking at the top of the Spanish Steps,’ Cameron explained, ‘trying to raise some money so we could go and have a drink. I got slightly exuberant and turned my ankle over.’ Cameron thought the leg was fine, so his friends left him. It turned out it was quite badly twisted and he had to crawl all the way down the Spanish Steps on his hands and knees. As a result he had to miss a good many of the sights, but as a contemporary at the time said euphemistically, he ‘made up for it well in other departments’. Quite what this means must remain a mystery, although, as one of Cameron’s close friends remarked, Dave, while no prude, was always ‘measured’.

For the first time in his life, he was enjoying real academic achievement. In the summer of 1983, at the end of the first year of his A-level course, he won the Trials Prize for Politics, which gave him a distinction, an excellent augury for the following summer. The following term, at the start of his second A-level year, his Option was the Spanish Civil War, drawing largely on Hugh Thomas’s celebrated history of the conflict, taught by Edward Wilson Smith. For his work on that topic he won another award, though this was a marginally less impressive achievement – there was only one other candidate in his year.

Sustaining his interest in politics, in the following (Lent) term he chose a subject taught by Dr Andrew Gailey, who was later to be housemaster to Princes William and Harry. The area he chose was ‘Northern Ireland: A Study in Conflict’, which suggests an awakening interest in the Conservative and Unionist Party. Gailey, himself from Northern Ireland, took the boys through issues such as how the state deals with terrorism, why there are great literary outpourings at times of stress and so on. It was a more serious and demanding course than many boys chose. Although little homework accompanied the course, Gailey said, ‘it never struck me that he was someone who went for the soft option’.

Gailey got to know Cameron well, becoming his Tutor for the second of his two years as a specialist when Tim Young took a sabbatical. He also taught him History of Art, during which Cameron had to choose a topic for a dissertation as part of his A-level course work. Gailey recalls his wife, an art historian, inviting Cameron to hold his arms out straight in front of him and piling ever more books on top of them. ‘I remember thinking, “Has he got time to read all this?”’ says Gailey. But, suddenly, he got to grips with it. As has happened many times since, he summed up what was required and did the necessary. ‘He just took the books, worked out his brief, wrote a very good thesis and got a decent mark. It was an impressive piece of work. He has the front of being quite jovial, laid-back, not very serious in a way, but if you told him, “You’ve got to get this done,” he could turn it on. I was quite surprised at his capacity to devour books.’

Eton and the Conservative Party go together. This was more true than ever in the early 1980s. Thatcherism was getting into its stride and with the Falklands reconquered and Michael Foot’s Labour Party humiliated at the polls, to back anyone but the Tories was to back the losers. But there were dissenters. James Wood, now a well-known literary critic and a contemporary of Cameron at Eton, was editor of the school magazine. He challenged the right-wing orthodoxy and wrote a philippic against Thatcherism which caused a fuss in the national press. Ian Cameron, having read about it in the Express, called David to lament the fact that the school was now evidently full of ‘Reds’, a complaint Cameron teasingly passed on to Wood (whose nickname, incidentally, was ‘Red’ Wood). Wood, though, says now, ‘I don’t recall [Cameron] being involved in any political activity at Eton.’

Had Cameron in fact decided on a career in politics from an early age? He has claimed that he hadn’t. In defending himself against the charge of having had a wild time at Oxford, he told the BBC that he didn’t know at the time that he was going to be a politician. He chose Augustus Pugin for his History of Art dissertation topic. But it was Pugin’s work on Chirk Castle, Wales (to which, handily, Cameron had access, through a relation) that was the subject of the dissertation, not the architect’s more famous decorations at the Houses of Parliament. John Clark says, ‘I’m pretty sure I viewed him as politically ambitious even then. He was articulate and politically motivated and interested. He was interested in the business of politics, in politics as a profession, even at that stage. I don’t think he’d planned it out in the way [Michael] Heseltine is supposed to have done. He found politics stimulating, in a good pragmatic Conservative way. He was intrigued by politics as an art, as a way of resolving problems.’

One acquaintance, asked when Cameron decided on politics as a career, faltered before answering and went off the record: ‘He decided at Eton, I think, that politics was the career for him.’ Another Eton contemporary says that he didn’t know Cameron well at school, but that he was referred to by a mutual acquaintance as ‘the guy who wants to be Prime Minister’. Another friend recalls Cameron, relaxing at Peasemore in his late teens, saying he wanted to be leader of the Conservative Party. (Sir Eric Anderson, Eton’s headmaster, cautions against reading too much into any such pronouncements.‘When I was fourteen I told people I wanted to play rugby for Scotland: that doesn’t mean there was the faintest prospect of it happening,’ he says.)

Cameron’s attitude to Eton was a healthily forward-looking one. ‘I always got the impression that Eton was a preparation, not an end, which is as it should be,’ says Andrew Gailey. ‘It was all about the future. I’m not sure what he wanted to be but I’m not surprised he’s in politics. It’s the interest plus the way he operates which means you’re not going to want to dig too deeply into philosophy but you’re going to want to make things happen.’ James Wood says: ‘I would say he didn’t seem someone who would certainly be in politics; what he seemed was someone who would be successful. His charm and decency – almost a kind of sweetness, actually – marked him out for a kind of general success in whatever he did. But politics did not look likely.’ Cameron’s friend James Fergusson remembers a conversation in which he discussed which boys in his year might emulate some previous Etonians and go on to become Prime Minister. One boy, and Fergusson believes it was Tom Goff, Cameron’s old friend from prep school, said he thought that, if anyone might, it would be Cameron. Asked about the exchange, Goff says: ‘James may well be right but I’m afraid I have no recollection of it.’ Another close friend, in Cameron’s house, says he remembers a conversation between him and Cameron as they looked at the statues of past Etonian prime ministers. ‘We were convinced (#litres_trial_promo) there would never be an Etonian prime minister again. I certainly didn’t think Dave would have a go at it. His only acting roles at school were as a serving-man and as a girl. He was never outrageously extrovert – just quietly popular.’

Cameron’s political persona as a teenager is hard to pin down. It is neatly illustrated by his choice of extra-curricular activity. Boys usually faced a choice between being a member of the Corps, the school’s junior army, or undertaking good works in the local community. Cameron did both. He would also go to Windsor, sometimes with a friend, to visit an old lady, a Mrs Creek, and provide her with some company over a cup of tea. The next day he would shoulder his Eton rifle.

Although Cameron was always going to be a Conservative, he once put on a slide show for a morning assembly about poverty and unemployment, to the backing of UB40. Some took this to be as much a reflection of a teenage desire to acquire credibility from association with a fashionable band as an expression of concern about the nation’s mounting unemployment figures. But his associates recall that his real passion was reserved for railing against the iniquities of the ‘Common Market’. Brussels, it seems, has been a Cameron target from the moment he started taking politics seriously. ‘It wasn’t brilliantly original but it was generally fairly soundly argued,’ says one who knew him well at the time.

Trade unions were another favoured mark. His appearance as a writer in the Chronicle, the school magazine, is limited to a solid but unremarkable review of a talk by former Labour minister Eric Heffer.

Eric Heffer, chairman of the Labour Party, gave us an interesting and informative talk about the relationship between the trade union movement and the Labour party. He emphasised the historical connection between the two and the basic principle of putting working class men into the house of Commons and then went on to explain that Tory trade union legislation, past and present, was tantamount to class legislation. Many of the questions were directly in response to what he had spoken about, but others ranged into the areas of Labour party leadership, Grenada [the tiny Commonwealth country recently invaded by the US] and the abolition of public schools. In an effective analogy, Mr Heffer then compared the trade union movement to a guards regiment, saying that if attacked they would ‘go down fighting with their backs to the wall’. It was a fascinating if slightly depressing forecast.

Tony Benn was another unlikely stimulus. Cameron has said that reading Benn’s book Arguments for Democracy helped pique his interest in politics. ‘Lots of it I disagree with (#litres_trial_promo), but I loved reading it. I like being stimulated by things I disagree with, almost rather than reading something and saying: “Yes, that is my creed.”’

But – in a pattern to be repeated at university – Cameron preferred to keep at one remove from the junior political practitioners. He attended the Political Society, which invited distinguished speakers from outside to address it. In his time Lords Home and Carrington, Len Murray, William Waldegrave, Frank Field and Grey Gowrie came to speak. But he was never on its committee (which would have offered the chance to meet and dine with the speakers), unlike, say, Boris Johnson, a year his senior and later to become a Tory MP and mayor of London. ‘It just wasn’t his style,’ says John Clark. ‘He didn’t draw attention to himself. He wasn’t effusive or loud. He certainly didn’t dominate in private business. You’d have to remind me of the others from that tutorial, although there was something about him that made him very memorable.’

But there was something more. There was an episode in private business when the Tutor asked each boy to put in words what they thought of other members of the group. Whether this was a test of diplomacy, of honesty or of human perceptiveness is unimportant. It was to reveal something not readily apparent in David Cameron, who was generally regarded as an affable, emollient, easy-going character. ‘I expected people to dance around the edge,’ says the Tutor in question, Tim Young. But the participants were brought up short when one of their number, John Crossley, perhaps displaying the candour of his Yorkshire heritage, pointed across the room at David Cameron and said, ‘You are tough as nails, you are, and no one realises it.’ The group fell silent. Tim Young recalls how struck he was by Crossley’s comment: ‘We didn’t do much in the session after that, everyone was so startled by what had been said.’ But, according to Young, Crossley – who died in a skiing accident some years later – was right. ‘I do remember him being very pleasant, yes, but there was also a steely determination which has been revealed since. I think he has quite a core to him, and it was a side of David that I hadn’t noticed.’

Others were coming to see the drive, though. Among them was Ferdie Mount, then working for Mrs Thatcher in Downing Street. Mount had received a call from his cousin Mary (Cameron’s mother), asking if David could come to his office to do an interview for the school magazine. Mount explained that he was tremendously busy and in any event tied by the Official Secrets Act but that he would think about it. This was never likely to fob off the young Cameron, who rang Mount’s office, fixed an appointment and simply turned up. He looked, says Mount, ‘pink and perky’ (he didn’t shave daily till after he left Eton), and ‘abounding in self-confidence’. ‘He instantly put me (#litres_trial_promo) at my ease and his genial chutzpah dissolved my ill-humour in a trice. It would not have taken extra-sensory powers to see that he would go far, though not perhaps with the miraculous speed that he did.’ Cameron worked extremely hard and thrived in the freedom that being a specialist allowed. John Clark says, ‘I did rate him very highly. I knew he was an ambitious, bright, intellectually curious guy. He was really quite sharp, able to pick up ideas quickly, to communicate them well.’ Another Old Etonian friend, although not of Cameron’s vintage, ascribes his emotional toughness to his schooling. Rupert Dilnott-Cooper, who was to work with him at Carlton Television, said: ‘I think that – albeit as a generalisation and I am not suggesting it applies to David – some Etonians can be emotionally “distant” sometimes about things. I think there can be a degree of dispassionate ruthlessness that comes down to saying, “Thanks very much. Next?” And whether that’s being at a boys’ boarding school at the age of thirteen, I don’t know. I have no idea if David is like that, but, in any event, I’m confident that he would be capable of being as ruthless as he needs to be.’

In an early newspaper profile (#litres_trial_promo), ‘a lifelong Conservative who has known Cameron since Eton’ said: ‘I don’t like David. He’s hugely arrogant. But everyone from my background is so enthralled about the idea of having a prime minister from among their ranks that to say anything against him would be seen as disloyal.’ Another school contemporary who finds the Cameron charm resistible says he has always had a calculating talent for impressing those who matter (‘If you weren’t socially interesting, one of the in-crowd, he would be very dismissive’), while yet another says, ‘He always struck me as a bit of a greaser.’ Cameron is also blessed with what some see as a very Etonian sense of entitlement, a feeling that there’s no reason he shouldn’t be a beneficiary of whatever might be in the offing.

Both facets of his character are evident in his choice of ‘Option’, an unexamined subject, like a hobby, often of a cultural or possibly professional nature. Cameron’s cultural tastes, his exasperated friends will confirm, have never been highbrow. Yet he chose ‘The Rise of the English Novel’, taught by the headmaster. For most Etonians the prospect of being taught by ‘the Head Man’, even one as popular and respected as Eric Anderson, would fill them with dread. The majority would prefer to keep their head down. That Cameron should choose to be taught by Anderson, just three months after nearly being expelled for taking drugs, says a good deal for his insouciance. This was not a boy to shrivel away into the corner.

People tend to assume (#litres_trial_promo) that Cameron must have been in Pop, the (then) self-electing society of prefects, chosen for their popularity and illustriousness. He was, after all, well liked, he was good at tennis and he was head of house. Indeed, some contemporaries now have trouble believing that he wasn’t in Pop, so well does he fit the bill. Maybe his comparatively low-profile house worked against him, in that it can help a boy to get into Pop if another boy in his house can promote his cause. Yet notwithstanding the house’s middling ranking, it managed to get no fewer than three boys in Cameron’s year into Pop, James Learmond, Roland Watson and Pete Davis. Conceivably, it was thought that there were already too many boys from JF in Pop. One member speculates – because he cannot remember – that Cameron might have been ‘slightly too polished for his own good. There might have been a feeling that he was socially a bit pleased with himself.’

John Clark is unsurprised at Cameron not getting into Pop. ‘He wasn’t a high-profile character. He wasn’t enough of a games player. He wasn’t good at the right things.’ Fred de Falbe, who was in Pop, agrees: ‘He was popular in a low-key sort of way, and he might have been a candidate at one stage, but, unlike a lot of us, he just knuckled down and got on with his work.’ Monty Erskine, who was in several of the same classes, says Cameron ‘wasn’t a flash git, which is what usually gets you into Pop’.

He might have made a good member of Pop, though. When he replaced his friend Roland Watson as Captain of his house (Watson stood down to concentrate on his cricket, at which he excelled), Cameron seems to have taken to his new position of responsibility comparatively well, and at a difficult time. Eric Anderson recalls that John Faulkner was going through a period of illness and was not therefore able to fire on all cylinders. ‘I remember hearing that John relied a good deal on David, as his head of house, to hold things together at that time, and that John found him good at making sure that the junior boys were properly treated.’ Mark Dineley, who, as a junior boy, overlapped with him by just one term, confirms this: ‘I do recall him being unusually approachable and affable. He never had his head in the clouds. You could always talk to him.’ Tom Rodwell, a year older, says that unlike most senior boys, who tended to seem ‘godlike’ for their imperiousness and authority, Cameron was ‘always someone you could have a talk to on the stairs. He was a friendly and fair person. I remember having a not very serious bet with him about whether Wales would beat England at rugger. I bet that they would, and they did. He still owes me a fiver for that!’

On one occasion, Cameron intervened to protect a boy, now evidently a senior figure with a financial firm in the City who wishes to remain nameless, who was being bullied about his Jewishness. ‘Cameron was very mature (#litres_trial_promo),’ says the man in question. ‘He didn’t get angry with them, or punish them, because then they would have taken it out on me. I’d have been fucked. Dave said, “It’s beneath you both to behave like this.” He was giving half the blame to me, you see, which I now understand was quite brilliant.’

Cameron’s development at Eton might be held up as an advertisement for what the place can offer those whose qualities need to be unearthed. ‘I think down at the bottom of the school there were lots of people who were identified as natural leaders of other pupils at the age of thirteen and fourteen,’ says Tim Young. ‘They might have been head of their prep school, but often these are the people who end up at the peak of their life being secretary of the golf club. They never again achieve the great heights that they achieve in their teens. The great thing about David is that he wasn’t pigeonholed like that and developed his obvious potential in the sixth form. He did so in his own way, unmarked by the sort of expectation which surrounds, say, the captain of the under-fourteen rugby team.’

Andrew Gailey says there is a discernible trend in boys whose academic talents flower late. ‘People who do that,’ he says, ‘although they grow in confidence more and more, they are never as confident as those who have started at the top. And there’s a sense in which he has always wanted to push himself and test himself more, not waste his time. He was able and ambitious, in a proper sense, but he was not one of those who was academically self-confident. There was a sense of him wanting to prove himself to himself.’

Is David Cameron a ‘typical Etonian’? Can there be such a thing in a school which supposedly encourages individuality? He does seem to have some of the characteristics that are associated with Eton. Jane Austen has a term, ‘happy manners’, which certainly seems to apply. Tom Lyttelton says: ‘I wouldn’t use the word charm, which can be pejorative. But a facility for putting people at their ease. That, I would have thought, Cameron had in spades.’ Confidence, too, he says, which ‘is helped by spending your teenage years in a rather beautiful place, having your own room, being in an essentially happy environment with some very good characters around you, older and younger’. John Clark says Cameron certainly appreciated what Eton offered him: ‘If you come from a well-to-do background, you’re surrounded by able people, you do well academically, you’ve got a lot of advantages, you feel fairly strong about that. Apart from private business, the range of social contacts that operate within a house, for example, mean you are mixing with the house master, the Dame [matron], a whole series of teachers and so on. I think these encourage a sense of social ease, and not one uniquely associated with your own group but one which moves beyond that. This explains something of the charm of Eton.’

But social (as opposed to academic) confidence is not as evident in many Etonians as it is in David Cameron. For all those who display that celebrated sense of entitlement, there are also others more inclined to question it, to be squeamish about such privilege. Why me? Is this really right? Do I want to be on the conveyor belt my parents put me on? James Wood says that Cameron was ‘confident, entitled, gracious, secure…exactly the kind of “natural Etonian” I was not’. There is little outward sign of David Cameron having kicked against what he had. Instead he accepted his parental assumption that ‘It’s okay as long as you put something back.’ ‘In every walk of life people try to find their own identity in relation to their parents, but David Cameron doesn’t seem to have done that,’ says one thoughtful Etonian outside his immediate circle.‘He’s a strange product of my generation. He just seems to have a mind-boggling level of self-belief. He seems to represent a continuation or perhaps regression to that noblesse oblige Toryism. Do we want to be ruled by the Arthurian knights again?’ As another puts it, ‘He’s a bit too “to the manor born” for my liking.’

Yet others, more admiring of Cameron, say Eton’s role should not be overstated. Tom Lyttelton says Cameron’s groundedness and contentment may well predate his attending the school: ‘One really wonders whether someone so standing-on-your-own-two-feet can ascribe that much to Eton, or whether he would be doing so well whatever school he had been at.’

Certainly Cameron took full advantage of the academic excellence that Eton offered. The boy who one contemporary described as ‘a bit of a nonentity at school’ got three As in his A-levels, then an even better result than it would be today. Another contemporary, who regarded Cameron’s success as a student of Politics – a subject which attracted few boys – as a misleading measure of his abilities, said at the time: ‘It is a scandal and a complete travesty that someone as mediocre as Dave Cameron can get a distinction.’ Cameron also sat the Scholarship Level exam in Economics and Politics and received a 1 grade. (He failed to turn up for another S-level exam in History, and so earned himself an X, for no score.) Having not been a likely Oxbridge candidate at all, he was now a strong one. Politics had become his forte, and his tutors were well placed to advise him on which college he should aim for. Tim Card and John Clark at Eton had connections with Brasenose College and encouraged Cameron to apply to read Politics, Philosophy and Economics. ‘We wanted him to do well and it was a very good place to do PPE,’ remembers John Clark, citing the presence of its politics tutor, the prolific Vernon Bogdanor, who, in addition to enjoying a good reputation in academic circles as a scholar, had something of a name in the wider world.

Cameron sat the entrance exam at the end of the Michaelmas term 1984. This so-called ‘seventh-term’ option was later forbidden as it was deemed to give too much of an advantage to pupils of private schools. He was accepted for an interview, which in hindsight may seem like a formality, but he was caught bluffing about how much philosophy he had read. It did not hold him back. He was awarded an exhibition to the college of his choice, Brasenose.

Having left school a fortnight before Christmas 1984, Cameron now had nine months in which to enjoy himself. James Learmond went to Nepal. Roland Watson went to Latin America. But few of his friends can remember what Cameron did in his gap year. ‘Whatever it was, it didn’t change him,’ said one. But while it is true that his travels were not as exotic as those of his peers Cameron did undergo a life-changing experience between school and university. In January 1985 he took up a temporary post as a researcher for Tim Rathbone, his godfather and the Conservative MP for Lewes.

If his mother’s family, the Mounts, represent the patrician element of Cameron’s political heritage, the late Tim Rathbone stands for a more radical, liberal tradition. Indeed Rathbone’s father John became Liberal MP for Bodmin from 1935 until, as a fighter pilot in the Battle of Britain, he was lost in action in 1940. His great-aunt Eleanor Rathbone was a suffragette and was later elected an independent MP for the Combined English Universities in 1929. She campaigned for women’s rights and against poverty and was among the first to spot the dangers of National Socialism in Germany in the 1930s. It is said that she once tried to hire a ship to rescue Spanish Republicans from reprisals during the Spanish Civil War.

Her great-nephew chose the Conservative Party, however, when after Eton and Oxford (he, too, read PPE) and a spell as an advertising executive in New York he was recruited to Central Office in 1966 – the year of Cameron’s birth. He became an MP in 1974, but by the time David Cameron turned up in his office in the Commons had found himself hopelessly out of step with the Thatcher government. Pro-European (he was later expelled from the party by William Hague for advocating support for the breakaway Pro-Euro Conservatives in 1997) and a vigorous opponent of apartheid in South Africa, he had also just rebelled against the abolition of the Greater London Council when his godson showed up for the first leg of a work-experience package that might have been designed to help him choose between politics and business.