Cameron: Practically a Conservative

Rathbone set him to work on two favourite themes, the lack of adequate nursery education and the manifold failures of his government’s drugs policy. (The latter prefigured Cameron’s own efforts as an MP in this area sixteen years later.) Inspired, Cameron started attending debates in the chamber of the House of Commons. He was present when Enoch Powell, speaking in an embryo-research debate, was interrupted by protesters throwing rape alarms from the public gallery.

But commerce as well as politics flows in his veins, and three months after arriving in the Commons he left it, heading for Hong Kong. Ian Cameron, through his employers Panmure Gordon, was stockbroker to the Keswick family. Henry Keswick was Chairman of Jardine Matheson, the Hong Kong-based conglomerate. Through that connection, Cameron was given the opportunity to work for the company in Hong Kong for three months. ‘His father Ian is a good friend of my father and uncle and of mine,’ explains Keswick. ‘We get friends of the firm, some of whose children want to go and get some experience of living abroad, under our mantle. We take a lot of interns before they go to Oxford or Cambridge and we take them for three months.’ Cameron – as his brother Alex had done three years earlier – worked for the Jardine Matheson shipping agency as what is known as a ‘ship jumper’. When a ship – for which Jardine is the agent – arrives in Hong Kong, a ship jumper would go out with a pilot in a launch, meet the captain, tell him which buoy to go to and check that all the documents were in order. The job was administrative, requiring no great talent, but it did need someone presentable and personable.

Cameron lived in one of Jardine’s company flats, sharing with other employees, and being generally well looked after, if modestly paid. He lived a largely expat life, mixing mostly with business people and enjoying the penultimate decade of Britain’s imperial control of the colony. It was an agreeably safe way of seeing the exotic East, a risk-free brush with the orient, interesting enough to feed the mind, but scarcely worthy of Indiana Jones. One day some acquaintances, anxious to explore a more vernacular Hong Kong beyond the bland, globally ubiquitous office blocks, said they wanted to go out in search of a small market or local restaurant of the sort where ‘real’ Hong Kong residents would go, and asked if Cameron might care to join them. In the event he was busy, but he couldn’t resist observing that the Hong Kong of big business was every bit as representative of ‘the real Hong Kong’ as any back-street enterprise of the sort they were talking about.

His journey back from the colony was rather more adventurous. In early June, he sailed (via a few days in Japan) to Nakhodka in what was then still the Soviet Union, before moving on to Khabarovsk, where he joined the Trans Siberian Railway and travelled to Moscow to meet a schoolfriend, Anthony Griffith. Although the reforming Mikhail Gorbachev had just become the Soviet leader, the country was still gripped by Stalinist illiberalism. For two young men to venture there without a guide was unusual. The pair travelled to what is now called St Petersburg, from where they flew down to Yalta on the Black Sea, scene of Winston Churchill’s famous 1945 encounter with Stalin and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

While there, lying blamelessly on an Intourist (state-sanctioned tourist) beach, they encountered two men, rather older than them. One spoke perfect English, the other perfect French. They were normally dressed, extremely friendly and evidently well off. Cameron and Griffith were not going to look this gift horse in the mouth and gratefully accepted their invitation to dinner. They were treated to vast amounts of caviar, sturgeon and so on, while being asked lots of questions about life in the UK. They sensed they were being encouraged to make disobliging remarks about Britain, but, patriotic even in the face of a caviar bribe, they resisted. The Russians were not to be put off. At the end of the meal they suggested meeting again the following night, to which the Old Etonians agreed. In the event, the Brits, by now a bit concerned and wondering whether their new friends’ motive was political, or possibly homosexual, failed to turn up at the chosen restaurant. Back in England, Cameron told friends this story, idly wondering if this was possibly a KGB attempt to recruit them, and – James Bond fan that he is – is tempted to believe it was. Had things gone differently, he and Griffith might have become the Burgess and Maclean de nos jours. As it turned out, their flit was westwards. From Yalta they headed for Kiev and thence, by now armed with Interrail passes, on to Romania, Hungary and western Europe, where Cameron dropped in to see his step-grandmother Marielen Schlumberger at her lakeside family home on Attersee, in Austria.

Cameron’s gap year gave him a taste of the two worlds to which he was attracted. Commerce would have been happy enough to have him. ‘We did say to David’, remembers Keswick,‘that if he’d like to come back and work for us, he should apply to us after university.’ But politics – and the influence of Tim Rathbone – won. Today as he tries to steer his party leftwards towards the political centre, Cameron knows that his late godfather, the man who helped inspire him to become a Tory MP in the first place, would have approved whole-heartedly.

OXFORD University 1985–1988 (#ulink_287f4514-3580-5ff0-b395-8f1c58a7bb89)

It was both a hostage to class warriors and a stroke of some brilliance–whether spontaneous or planned – when Cameron claimed in October 2005 that he had had ‘a normal university experience’. Regularly child-minding a Rastafarian’s infant son while the father cooks goat curry is most decidedly not a standard ‘university experience’. Punting with Jade Jagger is not normal. And dressing up in tailcoats and drinking dangerous quantities of vintage claret is normal only for a very small number of people. Cameron made his claim in deflecting a question about whether he had taken drugs at university. ‘If you go to university and don’t go to parties there is something wrong,’ he continued at a conference fringe event the day after his leadership election-winning speech. Had he answered the question directly and honestly the answer would almost certainly have been yes. But his consumption of cannabis – at most infrequent and moderate – during his three years at Oxford University is one of the less interesting features of his ‘normal’ residence at that great seat of learning.

David Cameron arrived at Brasenose College in Michaelmas term 1985 to read Politics, Philosophy and Economics. By the mid-1980s Oxford colleges were coming under pressure to admit more candidates educated at state schools, but the intake of Brasenose in 1985 suggests that that college’s tutors, at least, were not minded to submit. In lining up for his matriculation photograph Cameron found himself in familiar company. Five other Old Etonians had won places that year out of around a hundred freshers. Cameron was only the second Etonian in twenty-seven years to read PPE at the college. It was an unusually large intake from the school, especially for Brasenose, not one of Oxford’s grander colleges. While Christ Church and Balliol tend to attract the cream of the public school clientele, Brasenose is more modest, smaller and more intimate than most. It is located at the heart of the university on Radcliffe Square but is proud of its insularity; new members are not generally anxious about making a big impact on the wider Oxford stage.

Toby Young, a satirist (#litres_trial_promo), who overlapped with Cameron for a year at Brasenose, has drawn a caricature of its social ecology at the time. Its students, he has written, divided between ‘stains’ and ‘socialites’. The former anorak-wearing products of suburban state-education are contrasted with the more physically attractive scions of the elite. ‘Stains’ tried to get on in life, both academically and socially, and were despised as they did so by their rugby-playing, hard-drinking, privately educated peers. Young records how Cameron’s ‘unusually large number of Etonians’ threatened to disturb this scene when they arrived on the battleground in 1985. ‘Loud, hearty and unpretentious’, they joined forces with the ‘stain’-baiters eventually. ‘Initially the “sound” college men were a little suspicious of these young bloods, imagining that their apparent sympathy was merely a sophisticated form of taking the piss. However after the Old Etonians had proved themselves to be solid drinkers and didn’t complain when the hearties parked tigers [that is, vomited] all over their Persian rugs they were accepted into the fold.’

It would be unfair and wrong to suggest that Cameron did not mix socially at Brasenose, or that he was an unthinking member of the ‘socialite’ set. He picked his way carefully through the various camps, siding with the humorous against the earnest, but all the while keeping his eye on the goal he had set himself. One friend at the time remarked that Cameron had been motivated to get into Oxford partly to trump his elder brother. In truth, the pair had always got on well and – says someone who knows them both extremely well – were genuinely pleased at one another’s success. Whatever the spur, there was no doubt of Cameron’s next ambition: to get a first-class degree.

Some Etonians feel that after five years in charmed surroundings, they are ready for a dose of something a bit different. David Cameron was not one of these. At Eton, a boy’s timetable is finely calibrated to pack as much as possible into a day. On leaving, some boys breathe a sigh of relief at escaping the regimentation. But Cameron, showing a trait also evident in his father, managed his time as a student with the sort of ruthless efficiency that most people never manage in their careers. His relaxed manner belied a remarkable degree of self-discipline. By the end of his first year he had managed so to arrange his affairs that he reckoned he could complete his work in half the week and spend the rest of his time on other pursuits.

It helped, of course, that his new educational establishment was so like his old. Having developed a verbal fluency in tutorials at Eton, Cameron was always an impressive performer in similar arenas at Oxford. Brasenose’s PPE students were, in the words of one tutor, ‘quite a chatty lot’ and would readily confer with one another to thrash out problems with which they had been confronted. ‘David was an outstanding student,’ says one of his economics tutors, Peter Sinclair, who often taught in classes of a dozen or more. ‘He was very, very good at economics and his academic record was really unblemished. He was very endearing, and would be very supportive of the others.’ Sinclair points to a technique – perhaps Cameron would call it good manners – which has become something of a hallmark of his style in later life. ‘When he disagreed with something he’d really worked hard on and thought about a lot, he’d say, “Well, I don’t know much about this, but don’t you have a feeling that so-and-so,” when in fact he’d been researching quite carefully and knew so-and-so was probably right. He wouldn’t parade his knowledge arrogantly. His contributions in classes would be thought out and charmingly delivered, often to make a joke or make light of it.’

While in the abstract this might sound condescending – the public school boy playing the didact with his social inferiors – those who were there deny this. For one thing, there was little question that he was one of the cleverest. Vernon Bogdanor says he was among the brightest 5 per cent of students he has ever taught, and believes that Cameron’s influence was such that his presence in tutorials improved the grades of some of his contemporaries. ‘He was liked by his tutors since he was both courteous and stimulating to teach. He enjoyed an argument. It was clear from the moment he arrived that he was likely to secure a very good degree. I would have been surprised if he had not achieved a First. He is one of the ablest and nicest students whom I have taught,’ recalls Bogdanor today.

Outside tutorials he was popular with most – if not all – of his fellow students. ‘He was clearly an Etonian,’ says a Brasenose contemporary Steve Rathbone (no relation of Tim), who came from North Yorkshire and was state-school educated, ‘but he wasn’t swaggering around in a braying Sloaney way. Equally, he wasn’t trying to be something he wasn’t. He never tried to adopt an estuary accent, as many students do from major public schools, or wear right-on trendy clothes. He was a good mate of people from very different backgrounds.’ It must have helped, too, that he rarely forgot the little courtesies. Unusually, he would say ‘thank you’ to his tutor at the end of every tutorial.

He studied hard. ‘I do remember being impressed and slightly alarmed by how focused he was,’ says James Fergusson, an Eton and Brasenose contemporary who read English. ‘I was keen on my subject, but nothing like as keen as he was. He knew exactly what he wanted, which was to be the top-dog student and to get a First. That was it without a doubt. He loved it, he was passionate about it. At Brasenose a lot of life went on in the back quad, and you would see the PPE lot were having a good time. Dave would hold court in a classic Oxford way, quoting Locke and Hume. He loved it.’

His tutors, in recognition of his application and intelligence, upgraded his exhibition to a full scholarship. Cameron chose to continue with all three elements of his PPE course after the first year, rather than drop one and sit additional specialist papers in the remaining two as he was entitled to do. It is a testament to his self-confidence that he chose what Bogdanor insists was the harder path. ‘The tripartite option was the more difficult option, since it was harder to achieve an alpha standard in three such disparate subjects as Philosophy, Politics and Economics than in just two. During the time David was an undergraduate, fewer of those taking the tripartite option secured First than those taking the bipartite option.’

While university can be a time for experimentation and exploration, much of Cameron’s Oxford experience seems to have served to validate what had gone before. Peasemore remained close to him in more than simply a geographical sense. Some of his friends from Eton found his incurious side, his undeviating closeness to his cultural roots, a little stifling. While they were stepping gauchely out of the parental mould and exploring fresh fields, Cameron knew what and whom he liked and saw little reason to stray. He would invite his friends over to Peasemore to stay. Often there would be a lavish dinner, where his father – with characteristic generosity of spirit – would happily offer up excellent bottles of wine and port from his cellar.

One frequent guest at these occasions was James Fergusson, who admits he would be a strong candidate for the title of closest but most argumentative of Cameron’s friends. One afternoon, having recently returned from a mind-expanding stint backpacking, Fergusson remembers launching into Cameron: ‘I had just come back and was full of a left-wing vision of Latin America and I said very pompously to Dave, “The trouble with you is, you’re complacent.” It sort of bothered him, and I think he knew what I meant. The façade dropped. He said, “What do you mean? What do you mean?” I wouldn’t say he was blinkered, but he was quite safe, just utterly confident that the way he lived was the right way to live. He just didn’t see that it might be a bit narrow.’

If psychologically he was anchored to his upbringing, intellectually he was more challenging. Vernon Bogdanor has called him a classic Tory pragmatist, and it has often been said that his politics, first really in evidence in his studies at Oxford, is non-ideological. But James Fergusson says the guiding light is clear. ‘He thinks exactly like the philosopher David Hume,’ he says. ‘He’s a complete sceptic…it’s all about throwing out dogma and starting again from scratch. The revolutionary side of the early philosophers is precisely what turned him on.’

His fellow students tended to be left of centre, but not radically so. The SDP was well represented among his contemporaries, but there was never any doubt of Cameron’s allegiance to Margaret Thatcher. At a time when the country was polarised and a great many people despised the Tories, Cameron might well have become a remote or even hated figure. ‘After David Hume, he loved the free market and Thatcher,’ remembers Fergusson. ‘There was a strand of loving Thatcher in a tongue-in-cheek way. “Marvellous,” he would say, as if he was imitating an old buffer. He was always funny enough and clever enough so you couldn’t lampoon him for it, but at heart he believed it.’ Personal likeability seems to have done much to make his politics more acceptable to non-Tories.

Fergusson’s room in their first year at Brasenose was on Staircase 15, four doors down the corridor from Cameron’s, and they spent a great deal of time together. Fergusson was learning the guitar, not with unqualified success, and would pick away at Pink Floyd’s ‘Wish You Were Here’ and the Who’s ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ while waiting for Cameron to finish an essay and go for a drink with him. ‘He partied too, but he was incredibly organised about it,’ says Fergusson. The Brasenose of Cameron’s era has been written about almost as if it was Dorothy Parker’s Algonquin, not least by those with an interest in it being so. It was, though, a small pond where Cameron thrived, developing his interest in repartee and wordplay with Din Cellan-Jones, James Fergusson, Toby Young, Tim Harrison, James Delingpole, Will McDonald and Mark Mitchell. ‘There was a core of quite intelligent people who did a lot of heavy drinking and had a lot of fun,’ says one. While Cameron was well entrenched within his own set at Brasenose, some outside it objected to what they saw as his Etonian arrogance and resented him drifting in and out in his tailcoat for smart dinners. To some of those with a proprietorial sense of loyalty towards the college, he seemed to be having it both ways. There was something else about his social polish that some contemporaries found offputting. They claim that if Cameron found someone ‘socially interesting’ he would turn on the charm. For those not in favour, however, he had little time. This was nothing to do with class, assert his detractors, more a feline disposition to insinuate himself with the current in-crowd.

In his second year he joined the Ball Committee, tasked with organising the college’s May Ball. The committee’s chairman was Andrew Feldman, with whom he became friends. Cameron won a certain credit by persuading Dr Feelgood to play, despite the college’s scant resources (to save money, Feldman arranged for Brasenose to use the flagging flowers from Worcester College’s ball the night before).

Cameron’s membership of the Bullingdon Club has attracted much attention. It is an elitist dining club characterised by vast, boozy dinners and subsequent debauchery. Evelyn Waugh satirised it in Decline and Fall, calling it the Bollinger Club. ‘It numbers reigning kings among its past members,’ wrote Waugh. ‘At the last meeting, three years ago, a fox had been brought in in a cage and stoned with champagne bottles.’ Its defenders would say it represented merely youthful letting off of steam, a harmless juvenile excess. But members of ‘the Buller’ saw themselves as being in a class of their own and were inclined to glory in the antagonism they provoked in others (who would be accused of envy, bourgeois small-mindedness, priggishness and so on). If their over-exuberance was hard to swallow at the best of times, during the Thatcher years their snobbish and youthful self-regard would have shown them at their very worst.

When at the end of his first year Cameron was invited to join this socially prestigious, if rowdy, company he was flattered. ‘If you’re young and good looking you want to put your toe in all the waters,’ says Susan Rathbone, whose husband Tim had been a Bullingdon member a generation earlier. ‘Tim, who David admired and liked, would certainly have said to Dave, as he said it to his own children, “Make the most of it and don’t work too hard.” You can miss so much if you are totally studious at Oxford, although the Cameron family would not have liked the hooray side of it.’

With the approbation bestowed by the club came a price (even if his tailcoat was borrowed). One night, David Cameron returned to his room in college to find it had been ransacked. His furniture had been removed and considerable damage done. Cameron was called to see the Dean, a move of some seriousness. It was explained that this sort of thing was not welcomed, least of all at a college like Brasenose, and that the culprits needed to be identified. Cameron, obliged by the Buller’s code of omertà, refused and bore the punishment alone.

By general consent, Cameron was not a typical Bullingdon member. As one of his more thoughtful and deft Etonian friends puts it, with some understatement, ‘Dave is a cautious man, someone who would think twice before throwing a bottle at a policeman.’ Some say the control he applied to his excesses shows him as being rather more calculating than a carefree teenager ought to be. When policemen’s helmets were being removed, shotguns being loosed off from the back of cars or waitresses insulted, McCavity wasn’t there.

Giles Andreae and Dominic Loehnis (a school and university contemporary who became very friendly with Cameron in the early 1990s) both say they have never seen Cameron ‘out of control’ drunk. ‘He would have got off his face at the Bullingdon,’ says a close friend, ‘but all that vomiting and so on would not have been him at all.’ Another friend, no stranger to disciplinary procedures, says: ‘All that stuff with people being sick over each other just wasn’t his thing. He was a responsible sort of person. Without being square, what flicked his switch was wit and repartee. He just wasn’t the sort to get roaring drunk and destroy the fittings – he wasn’t nearly wild enough. If he was in company when people were doing that sort of thing, he’d worry and say, “Oh, don’t do that.”’

Why, then, did he agree to join the Bullingdon? One longstanding friend said he was ‘amazed’ that he accepted, as it didn’t seem his cup of tea at all. According to his own account, it was because ‘Friends did. You do things at university.’ He was, though, a popular figure, had been to Eton and could afford it. ‘Because he was confident and sociable and easy in his skin, people liked him,’ said a friend. Wanting to enjoy Oxford to the full, he was disinclined to say no. As Susan Rathbone said in another context, ‘He’s a great one for giving something a go.’ And, as James Fergusson says, Bullingdon dinners ‘did at least start off sober’. A bit like the man who buys Playboy magazine for the interviews, Cameron seems to have gone along to the Bullingdon for the conversation.

Nevertheless, even for Cameron, being a member of the Bullingdon was not a risk-free business and he had some close escapes. One evening, after the statutory drunken dinner, a handful of Bullingdon members took against a pot plant growing outside an unpretentious restaurant in central Oxford, presumably because it infringed the members’ exquisite notion of good taste. So they threw it through the window of the restaurant, causing mayhem and distress. The police were called and arrests were made. At this point ‘the Etonians’ (as one present described them) saw no point in getting themselves needlessly into trouble with the law – and ran for it. One who witnessed the event remembers the innocent making hasty excuses: ‘Boris Johnson turned out to be remarkably nippy for a cruiserweight, his bulky torso seen disappearing over Magdalen Bridge on a pair of skinny legs.’ A passing taxi-driver saw two weary revellers and called out, ‘Hop in, they’ve just arrested your mates over there,’ and they drove off into the night. Cameron (‘tired and in need of rest’ according to one eyewitness) had gone to bed before the incident – aware that trouble was brewing.

At the start of his second year, Cameron joined the Octagon Club, a lower-key affair but one which required members to dress up in yellow-lapelled tailcoats. He was not proposed for Brasenose’s slightly smarter Phoenix Club, one of Oxford’s oldest dining clubs and the successor to the celebrated Hellfire Club. His exclusion from membership of Brasenose’s pre-eminent dining club was on the grounds of insufficient sporting prowess, explained a contemporary. The resentment aroused among those educated at more minor public schools by Cameron’s ease with all members of the college is probably nearer the mark.

Did he take drugs at Oxford? A heavy-lidded public school friend says: ‘It was never his thing. It was all booze, mostly beer then. I was into smoking dope. He just wasn’t. If he’d wanted it he could have asked me. He was a social boozer, in a perfectly civilised sort of way.’ Giles Andreae says: ‘I couldn’t swear on my life that he never smoked a joint at Oxford, but I saw a lot of him and would be very surprised.’ The ethos of Brasenose indulgence was very much focused on alcohol, a long way from, say, that of Christ Church, where Olivia Channon, the Cabinet minister’s daughter, died at a party in 1986. Cameron’s interest in narcotics seems to have been minimal. As his friend back at Eton had said, he was always ‘measured’. A close friend says that while some of his contemporaries were trying speed, for example, he wasn’t interested. The most he had indulged in was ‘occasionally a joint or something’.

Cameron’s good looks and unforced charm meant he was rarely short of female attention. He had had lots of girlfriends in his teens and, as one friend put it, ‘he went out with some absolute crackers’. At Oxford, he would go to old-fashioned sherry parties to meet girls. He also went to the Playpen nightclub, which was run by friends and was a popular haunt for those anxious to find likemindedly uninhibited souls. There Cameron would set to work on the opposite sex for what he would call, a little crudely perhaps, an evening’s ‘wooding’. Purely as a precaution, he once felt the need to visit a sexual diseases clinic (this was not, as has been suggested, for an HIV test). On other occasions, he would simply stand at the back, puffing on a Marlboro Lite and chatting with his male friends. Women were attracted, specifically, by his intelligence, his sweetness of nature and his emotional security. Many of his friends speak of how candid, how unEnglish, he is about his emotions. Frequently he will be in tears at the end of a play or film, and be quite open and willing to talk about it. This is no wheeze: he is confident enough not to regard it as a sign of weakness.

In his first term he dated a girl called Catherine Snow, who was at St Edmund Hall. Snow was notably strong-willed. ‘Dave didn’t have to do much decision-making while he was going out with her,’ says a friend. The most serious of his Oxford girlfriends was Francesca (‘Fran’, as she was known then) Ferguson, a statuesque, artistic and forthright half-German History student. Cameron was, according to a friend, ‘mad about Fran’. She arrived at Oxford having had no serious boyfriend and became a thoroughly worldly and lively character. They started going out shortly before Christmas in their first term and it quickly became a pretty serious affair. The daughter of a peripatetic diplomat, she was very conscious of not being from the same settled Home Counties milieu as Cameron, but they seemed a good pair. ‘I didn’t go skiing (#litres_trial_promo) with everyone else, or stay in the same house in France as they all did, so I didn’t really feel a part of his very English world,’ she says. ‘I was bored senseless with that party scene in England. He managed to be always comfortable in it but his life had more content. He would read more, think more. He wasn’t one of that bland lot.’

She invited him to stay with her parents in Kenya in the summer of 1986, prompting him to take a temporary job shifting crates near Newbury to help earn enough money. Both enjoyed the holiday hugely, spending time away on ‘a real safari, with trucks’, and Cameron, having missed his plane home and delayed returning by a week, enjoyed the celebrated (from White Mischief days) Muthaiga Country Club and playing golf with Francesca’s father, John. He impressed her parents with his charm, but there was an initial sticky moment involving her German mother Monika. He brought a present for his hosts of a Monty Python record, presumably thinking it would be something of an ice-breaker, should that be necessary. What he did not recall until the record was playing on the first evening was the North Minehead By-election sketch, which includes a scene of highly dubious taste featuring a ‘Mr Hilter’. Monika Ferguson still remembers with amusement the look of embarrassment on Cameron’s face. Nonetheless, so impressed was she by Cameron’s easy manner and intelligence that she told her daughter one evening, ‘That chap is going to be Prime Minister one day.’ On leaving he won further goodwill by discreetly leaving a tip and a thank-you note for Alice, the Kenyan woman who had cleaned his room.

Francesca and Cameron went out for nearly eighteen months. She wanted to experiment, but her boyfriend didn’t feel the same. ‘I was too much for him,’ remembers Ferguson, who now runs an architectural practice in Basel, Switzerland. ‘I was too demanding of his time. I wanted to have arguments and be distracted, but when someone is very ambitious and wants to get a First they don’t want someone demanding too much of them, and I think I probably did that. Also, I was quite jealous and would provoke him to try to shake him out of his self-assuredness.’ When Cameron ended the relationship, she was very upset and asked a friend to speak to him on her behalf. The friend remembers he was unshakeable. The relationship was to end. She was also struck by how much he seemed genuinely concerned that Francesca should not feel too hurt.

Generally he is good at keeping up with old girlfriends, but his relationship with Lisa De Savary, a retiring, sweet-natured girl and daughter of the flamboyant property developer Peter De Savary, did not end well. She fell for Cameron in a big way, but, as a friend puts it, ‘Dave kind of dumped her and she was very cross about it. It all left rather a nasty taste.’ He also went out with Alice Rayman, a student at Wadham, who marked a reversion to type. She became an entertainment lawyer and married the son of Tory politician Tom King.

Oxford offered plenty of opportunities for Cameron to play sport. He captained the college tennis team, and played cricket (‘badly’, says a staff member), also for the college. He also made the occasional (restful) sortie on to the river. One Saturday towards the end of his second year at Oxford, Cameron invited his sister Clare, then aged fifteen, to visit. She was preparing for exams and Dave thought it would be a good opportunity to show her his new surroundings. She brought along a friend, Jade Jagger, daughter of Rolling Stone Mick Jagger, a fellow pupil at St Mary’s, Calne, whose budding beauty did not pass unnoticed among Dave’s friends. Dave decided to take his little sister and her friend out in a punt in time-honoured fashion. He asked James Fergusson to join them, and he helped contribute to an idyllically innocent afternoon on the river by taking turns with the punt pole and chatting idly. At tea later in the room of James Delingpole, now a journalist, Fergusson played an imperfect version of ‘Satisfaction’ on the guitar, whereupon Jade piped up proudly, ‘My dad wrote that!’ The following Monday, Cameron’s mother Mary received a call at home. It was Mick Jagger, not pleased. ‘What’s all this my daughter’s been getting up to with your son?’ he demanded. ‘You know I don’t approve of bloodsports.’ Mary, dipping lightly into her reserves of breeding and politesse, explained gently that punting is what one does in a punt, and that his daughter had enjoyed an entirely peaceful afternoon punting on the river. Cameron, who adores retelling the story, later muttered a little impatiently that ‘it shows how much these people have to learn’.

Having spent his second year living in college, with a big, panelled sitting room and tiny, cold bedroom, Cameron’s third and final year was spent living at 69 Cowley Road, sharing with Giles Andreae, his friend from earliest times, Sarah Hamilton (a product of St Paul’s Girls School, who was studying law) and David Granger, a popular sportsman, now in television. While the pressure was on for the keen student anxious to get a First, Cameron continued to enjoy himself. The house had a laid-back flavour, and benefited from his enthusiastic efforts in the kitchen, often to cook the odd Peasemore pheasant for an informal dinner party. ‘He would always be very concerned that you were enjoying yourself, and then if you were he would be full of self-mocking praise for himself,’ remembers a friend.

‘There was a fair amount of beer and wine about,’ says Giles Andreae, ‘but it certainly wasn’t a house full of ravers.’ They would use the local kebab van a good deal, as well as the Hi-Lo, a cheap Jamaican restaurant directly opposite their house patronised by generations of undergraduates. There Cameron, Andreae and their friends would go once or twice a week – sometimes late at night – for goat curries, funky chicken and Red Stripe lager, served up by the Rastafarian chef– owner Hugh Anderson, who is also remembered for his over-proof rum. ‘He was a happy, easy-going character, quite pleasant,’ remembers Andy, as the Rastafarian is known to everyone. ‘He was very modest and very orderly, not a wild guy at all.’ So orderly were Cameron and Andreae that Andy would hand over his one-year-old son Daniel to the two undergraduates to look after. The little boy was known, a little distantly perhaps, as ‘boy child’. Cameron and Andreae would bounce him on their knees as they watched daytime television when Andy was busy in the kitchen over the road. Cameron, for one, made a point of never missing Going for Gold, a programme presented by Henry Kelly, which he may have omitted to mention in some of his subsequent job interviews.

One Lent term, he was chosen, as a guinea pig, to spend five weeks at Stanford University. Friends say it was five of the most enjoyable weeks of his life. He shared a room with two Americans and was required to do pretty well no work. Camilla Cavendish, now a journalist with The Times, who followed in his footsteps a year later, says that the Americans had all adored Cameron, not least for his accent. ‘I got the impression I was a big let-down after Dave,’ she says.

It is said that Cameron is notably loyal to his friends – one says his dependability is the best of his many assets – but in a milieu as privileged as his, where the going was pretty well always good, there might not be a great many opportunities to show it. Yet Giles Andreae was a beneficiary of his – and his parents’ – steadfastness. During their last year at Oxford, he was found – after several wrong diagnoses – to have Hodgkin’s disease. The delay in the diagnosing of the cancer required him to have intensive chemotherapy, sedatives and steroids, as well as a variety of experimental drugs. For each bout of chemotherapy, he had to undergo a general anaesthetic and was left debilitated and low.

Andreae’s survival was a matter of touch and go for some months. To help him recover his strength after the treatment, Cameron would drive his friend to his parents’ house at Peasemore in a battered Volvo he owned as a student. ‘Dave used to take me down in his car, tuck me up in bed and give me some videos,’ says Andreae, who would then stay for two or three days until he was strong enough to go back to Oxford. ‘Dave, despite it being the middle of finals, would pop by to say hello, and managed to find some humour in a pretty grim situation. He was a very supportive friend, but it was typical of his family to do that.’

On the night of 11 June 1987 Cameron held a party in his college room to celebrate Margaret Thatcher’s third successive election victory. It was a rare political act at university. While future Tory stars like Michael Gove, Boris Johnson, Mark Field, Ed Llewellyn and Ed Vaizey threw themselves into student politics, either at the Oxford Union or in the Oxford University Conservative Association, Cameron stayed on the sidelines, rather as he had at Eton. He would go along to hear a big-name speaker, but he took little part. His non-participation irks some fellow Tories. One contemporary, who remains active in politics, said: ‘You might think it a little strange that at the time – the height of Thatcherism, when just a year before there had been busloads of left-wing students going to the miners’ strike – he wasn’t galvanised.’ Cameron, as an implicit, deeply tribal Tory, felt little need to prove he was a Conservative. Another student politician contemporary says that Cameron was ‘too cool for school’. Steve Rathbone says he and Cameron shared a distaste for serious political discourse, particularly with opponents. ‘The trouble with some of the lefties was not that they were left wing – that was fine – but that they were earnest and humourless. They were too po-faced and didn’t know when to park their ideology outside. Dave and I did use to bait them a bit about that.’

That Cameron was not active in student politics is not to say that he did not have a definite view. ‘Dave’s politics were very much centrist Tory,’ says Rathbone. ‘He was very mistrustful of the Monday Club types who were always banging on about how Mandela [then still in prison] was a terrorist.’ Later Rathbone, as the elected president of Brasenose Junior Common Room (JCR), had to escort John Carlisle of the Monday Club into the college. ‘Neither of us had any sympathy with Carlisle’s views and I didn’t like the guy, but there was a student demo about it, with a tangible level of hatred against him, spit flying and everything. It was really unpleasant, much worse than the standard sort of student demo. Dave was flat against that sort of thing.’

While David Cameron supported the right of Carlisle to speak – against the opposition of his friend Andrew Feldman – he was at least consistent in his libertarianism. In March 1987 he caused some unhappiness among those who felt he was not pulling his weight ideologically when, during one of his generally passive encounters with the Union, he supported the decision to allow Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams to speak there. Cameron’s view was that he should be allowed to have his say and that his audience should be able to make an informed judgement, in favour or against. He tried this line on his tutor Vernon Bogdanor, who disagreed, saying that Sinn Fein’s relationship with the IRA was unhealthily close and that the normal democratic rules should not apply. Having heard Adams speak, Cameron told a friend that he felt ‘grubby’ about listening to the Northern Irishman, and that Bogdanor had been right.

Academically, Vernon Bogdanor would have been an ideal person to stimulate Cameron’s learning. He was among a number of Oxford academics who, disenchanted with what they saw as a damaging leftward move by the Labour Party, had joined the newly formed centrist Social Democratic Party. Bogdanor, who in some ways had helped provide some of the intellectual underpinning of the new party, was ideally placed to challenge his star pupil’s assumptions. Further, he preferred to be challenged by his students, so Cameron had every opportunity to fight his corner on, say, the rights and wrongs of the electoral system. Bogdanor has spoken of Cameron’s old-fashioned, highly pragmatic approach to politics. While he had leanings towards Euro-scepticism, he tended to approach problems on a ‘whatever works’ basis.

His Economics tutor, Peter Sinclair, remembers: ‘Typically when David was debating he would take a more pro-market view than a number of them.’ Sinclair would encourage his students to take the pure ‘market’ position as a point of reference and ‘pep it up with very recent, interesting, controversial stuff, typically from American academics, stuff about to be published, or really good working papers, which they would have read, and try to avoid clichés. Don’t just come up with slogans, really think. And he was exceptionally good at that.’ Again, the Cameron manner seems to have made his message more palatable. ‘I can remember some of his interventions,’ says Sinclair. ‘He’d say, “Hang on, you can’t really say that – look at the stats.” He’d always put it very nicely. He was rather keener than the others on the logic of what the market would lead to and slightly less concerned with the wrinkles that could justify a different view. He was quite freethinking and would not tend to take a standard view. His views were on the whole a bit more to the right than most of the others.’

John Foster, his Philosophy don, said he was very clever, but showed little inclination towards being an academic. ‘He focused on what was required. He didn’t lose sleep over philosophical problems, about the ultimate nature of things, but he was extraordinarily competent.’ It is with reference to this philosophically incurious, pragmatist facet of David Cameron’s nature that his non-engagement in student politics should be seen.

‘The Union was lots of people trying to project themselves into a world of politics where they had to prove themselves rhetorically,’ says Francesca Ferguson, ‘but he’d never had any trouble with winning an argument. Loads of people at Oxford were redefining themselves but he didn’t need to redefine himself. He was part of that whole part of society which is heading for running the country. It’s as simple as that. He didn’t feel he had anything to prove. Actually maybe he was just a lot more adult than a lot of people at Oxford.’