Cameron: Practically a Conservative

Coming from a family line of Tories, via Eton, to Oxford did not encourage him to advertise his political colours in formal surroundings. While he was as happy as anyone to thrash out arguments about the role of the state, personal freedoms and so on in small informal groups, he disappointed his more zealous Tory contemporaries by not joining in with the further humiliation of the Labour Party. It could be that attitudes at Brasenose compounded the numbing of his political ambition at that time. ‘People would just sit around and drink coffee, chatting and just loving it, and that was their life,’ says Peter Sinclair. ‘It was a contented, cheerful, unstressed place. When he arrived, people in the year above would have said, “Don’t bother with the Union, they’re horrible hacks, knifing each other, publicity-seeking creeps.” That’s the line he would have heard from everybody in Brasenose, so he might have thought, “Right, that sounds good advice.’’’

For some students getting to Oxford is enough, but for Cameron it was a staging post. Some, like Francesca Ferguson, say his privileged background helped him deal with an experience that some can find overwhelming. ‘You have to be really attuned to that level of privilege to actually make something of it without having an issue with it or being so overwhelmed that you don’t actually achieve,’ as Francesca Ferguson puts it. ‘David totally took it in his stride. He always knew what he wanted, was hugely disciplined and did a lot of work. He never felt he had to prove anything to anyone except to his professors in his exams.’

By now acquisitive for achievement, he did just that. In the summer of his third year, as predicted by Vernon Bogdanor, he acquired a First. He celebrated by going to the pub with his friend David Granger (who was to learn later that he had got a Third). Years later, he conceded to an interviewer that it may be naff to be proud of your degree, but that he was proud nonetheless. It was vindication of his talents. Now he had to put them to some use.

SMITH SQUARE Conservative Research Department 1988–1992 (#ulink_b5053463-0eb0-5be0-9bf4-bc3d4c854218)

David Cameron’s political career (#litres_trial_promo) began with a ‘judicious prodding’ from the Royal Household. Although he had applied for a number of management consultancy and banking jobs while at Oxford (but before he had taken his Finals), none of these came to fruition. With a first-class degree in PPE, previous experience as a Conservative MP’s researcher and impeccable Tory pedigree, he had every chance of success. But evidently it was decided that nothing should be left to chance when, in due course, he was invited to attend interviews at Conservative Central Office (CCO), the party’s London headquarters, then in Smith Square, Westminster. Applicants were seen first by the Research Department’s deputy director, Alistair Cooke, and then, if judged suitable, by its director, Robin Harris.

Cooke recalls a curious episode on 15 June 1988, the day Cameron’s appointment fell due. ‘Shortly before David Cameron’s interview, the telephone rang. The voice announced that it was calling from Buckingham Palace. Its tone was distinctly grand. The person on the other end of the line said, “I understand that you are to see David Cameron. I’ve tried everything I can to dissuade him from wasting his time on politics, but I have failed. I am ringing to tell you that you are about to meet a truly remarkable young man.”’ Cooke adds, ‘I thought, “Why is this unknown person giving me this unsolicited testimonial?” if that is what it was: there was no attempt to persuade me either way, to take him or not to take him.’

A call like that is bound to lodge in the mind. Indeed Cooke says he dined out on it endlessly, long before Cameron became well known. The story first surfaced publicly (#litres_trial_promo) shortly after Cameron became leader when Harris was thought by some (erroneously, says Harris) to have suggested that the new Conservative leader owed his first position in politics, in part, to string-pulling. In any event, Cooke disagrees. He says he told Robin Harris about it at the time, and that it had no bearing on the outcome. ‘Clearly David was quite outstanding – one of the very best of all the young people I interviewed over the years – and needed no help from anyone to impress the people at Central Office. But that does not alter the fact that what the voice from the Palace told me was absolutely true.’

So who was the mystery caller? It might be fair to assume that it was Captain Sir Alastair Aird, then Comptroller and later equerry to the Queen Mother and husband of Fiona Aird, Cameron’s godmother. That, indeed, was David Cameron’s own belief when the story first surfaced. But the suggestion is vehemently denied by the Airds. Lady Aird, having repudiated the suggestion, consulted her husband for confirmation and said: ‘Alastair has never ever made that sort of call. He was incredibly careful about being thought to have used his position or anything. It could not possibly have been Alastair. They’re hugely proscribed from doing anything political. I just know that it could not have been Alastair.’

When this was put to David Cameron’s office, they suggested that perhaps the caller had been Sir Brian McGrath, a Peasemore neighbour and friend of Cameron’s parents who then worked as private secretary to Prince Philip. But he, too, though named as a referee for the job, denies it. ‘It wasn’t me,’ he says. ‘I don’t think they even called me, to ask me to vouch for his character and so on. I certainly didn’t initiate anything. He’s quite capable of standing on his own two feet without any help from me. One thing I’m certain of is that I didn’t ring Central Office.’ Frustratingly, the phantom string-puller has yet to be unmasked.

Assuming the call wasn’t a hoax, the story illustrates, as if that were needed, how well connected Cameron is. But, tantalisingly, it fails to answer the question of how committed he was to going into politics when he left university. The mystery caller had said he was determined to enter politics, despite attempts to persuade him against it, yet in fact he had already applied for other jobs. At what point had this determination struck? Was it when prospective employers failed to detect an aptitude for knuckling down to a City career? He was also interviewed by the Economist but was turned down – mercifully, he says, as he is not by nature a journalist. He has said that he applied for CRD when he came across a brochure from the Oxford careers department in his pigeonhole. Some say he simply fell into the Conservative Party because, having applied to all the blue-chip merchant banks and management consultants (William Hague’s McKinsey’s among them), he had failed to find a job elsewhere.

Robin Harris has no recollection of Cameron’s interview but thinks he would have asked him two standard questions. One, ‘Why do you think you are a Conservative?’ to assess ideological commitment, and the other, ‘What do you think of the Medium-Term Financial Strategy?’ to apply a little intellectual pressure. Even for those familiar with the rigours of one-to-one tutorials with Oxbridge dons, CRD interviews could be an intimidating experience. But Cameron, despite (#litres_trial_promo) – rather than because of – the royal intervention, did well enough to be offered a position.

When he first reported for duty at Smith Square on 26 September 1988 he was stepping on to an established fast-track to high political office. The list of former CRD staffers who have gone on to greatness is a long one. When Cameron was there, Michael Portillo was the most recent of its graduates to have made it into the Cabinet. Portillo’s biographer, Michael Gove, describes CRD as a ‘nursery of Tory talent (#litres_trial_promo)’. ‘The CRD is part of the party machine but subtly superior to the rest of it – in much the same way as the Guards are to the rest of the Army. It is primarily a secretariat to the party when in government, an alternative civil service when in opposition, a supplier of ammunition in elections, and an intelligence-gatherer and disseminator at all times. But its status and influence extends beyond the sum of its functions.’

Cameron joined at a crucial juncture in the history of the Conservative Party. Just eighteen months earlier, Margaret Thatcher had won a third successive election victory – a feat that hadn’t been achieved for more than a century – but her power was beginning to ebb away. Michael Heseltine had already dealt the first blow by resigning over the Westland affair in 1986 while Cameron was in his first year at Oxford. Tensions over Europe, the direction of economic policy and the political consequences of the poll tax ground away at Thatcher’s waning power base during her third term. With Heseltine a standard around which rebels on the backbenches rallied, Thatcher thought she could at least rely on the total, unswerving loyalty of the Research Department.

Her speech on 20 September 1988 in Bruges, Belgium, setting her face against a European Union ‘super state’, might have infuriated some parliamentary colleagues. But nowhere would it have been more rapturously received than on the fourth floor of Conservative Central Office, home of the CRD. One of those already there describes a ‘hyper right-wing Zeitgeist’ infecting the young zealots working under Harris and Cooke. Cameron, says his former colleague, quickly fitted in. He showed few signs of disavowing this Zeitgeist, which entailed Thatcher herself being universally and reverentially referred to in private conversation as ‘Mother’.

The young PPE graduate was handed the Trade and Industry, Energy and Privatisation brief, a respectable if rather dry subject area. He shared an office, 512, with another researcher under the direction of Ian Stewart, head of the Economic Section. The office was one of a number arranged down a long corridor with Harris and Cooke at one end; next in superiority was Guy Black, head of the Political Section, and thereafter offices corresponded roughly to the great Whitehall departments. Thus Cameron, aged twenty-two, was nominally in charge of Conservative Party research into trade and industry policy.

The formality and hierarchy of the office accommodation reflected the ethos of the CRD, which was run much like a school. A call to see the director or his deputy could be a prelude to a bruising encounter for young men and women more accustomed to being told how clever they were. Set exacting standards, Cameron learned quickly to prepare accurate, succinct papers to order. His facility for writing clear and powerful briefs was honed in CRD, although one of his managers said he showed natural ability from the start. But while the department’s professionalism would stand him in excellent stead, what was really invaluable were his new colleagues.

It is a remarkable feature of the backroom staff and kitchen cabinet that have surrounded Cameron since he won the leadership that so many worked with him at CRD in the run-up to the 1992 election or shortly afterwards. Just as in the private sphere, where his circle of friends has not greatly widened from those that he made at Eton, so politically he has fashioned a Praetorian guard from early allies and friends. His stint in Smith Square holds many keys to his choices a decade and a half later.

This ‘gathering of the gang’ is worthy of some scrutiny. The first important contact Cameron made was another Old Etonian graduate of Oxford. Ed Llewellyn, a year older, had been a distant figure at both school and university (where he, unlike the current Tory leader, was active in student politics). Even now that they were colleagues – Llewellyn was handed the tricky European Community brief – his relative seniority put him, initially at least, above the new arrival’s station.

The next to arrive was another Oxford graduate named Ed with a reputation as a hack. The name Ed Vaizey had become a fixture in Cherwell during his time at Oxford as the student newspaper detailed the exuberant antics of the right-wing son of Lord Vaizey, the eminent economist ennobled by Harold Wilson in his infamous ‘lavender list’ of 1976 (allegedly for advising Marcia Falkender on her sons’ education), and Marina Vaizey, the art critic. Both Vaizey and Llewellyn had already done some voluntary work for the CRD before going up to Oxford and so had an ‘in’ with Cooke and Harris that Cameron did not. But on arrival at CRD in early 1989 Vaizey found himself junior to Cameron just as Cameron was junior to Llewellyn by dint of length of service. Not himself the retiring sort, the young Vaizey was immediately struck by how at ease Cameron already appeared around even very senior politicians.

Although Vaizey was to become a friend and ally, the next two figures on the scene are the most important for Cameron’s political development. In ideological terms – as well as in any other – Rachel Whetstone is a thoroughbred. Her grandfather was Sir Antony Fisher, an Eton-educated former RAF officer who made millions from the introduction of intensive chicken farming to Britain from the US and used part of the proceeds to fund right-wing think-tanks. Organisations like the Institute of Economic Affairs, which he founded and chaired, helped inject the ideas of Frederick Hayek and Milton Friedman into the political mainstream across the world. Sir Antony died just before his granddaughter started working at CRD but his daughter, Rachel’s mother Linda Whetstone, remains an influential figure on the libertarian right. Rachel’s father, Francis Whetstone, is a Conservative councillor in East Sussex. Their daughter was raised in the couple’s manor house near Wealden, and was educated first at Benenden and then at Bristol University. Socially, as well as politically, Cameron and Whetstone were cut from the same cloth and it was not surprising that the two became friends soon after she joined the CRD in early 1989.

A far more unlikely addition to the set arrived three months later. Small, cocky, shaven-headed and foreign-born, Steve Hilton blew through the doors of the Conservative Party on the back of a hurricane. The young undergraduate was processing claims from the Great Storm in early 1988 in a Brighton insurance firm. It was tedious work for an intelligent man and he happened to see a party political broadcast in which Peter Brooke, then Tory Party chairman, invited any viewers who wanted to help the Conservative Party to dial 01 222 9000. He dialled the number and some months later found himself working as a volunteer in the CRD’s library – an early and personal lesson, perhaps, in the power of political advertising.

Something about Hilton impressed Harris that summer. Perhaps he was taken with the fact that he had made a conscious choice to join the Tories, rather than being born into the party. Hilton’s mother and father had moved from Hungary to Britain in the mid-1960s not, as has been reported, to flee the Soviet repression of 1956 but to further their education. Nor did the surname come from the first hotel they stayed in on arrival: Hilton thinks his father chose it because it was a close approximation of his real name, Hircsak. His parents’ relationship did not withstand the move and his father moved back to his homeland. At the age of twelve, upset that letters to his father were no longer being answered, Hilton set out to visit him during a holiday to see his mother’s family in Hungary. Having caught the train to Budapest alone, he went to his father’s last known address and discovered the sad truth. His father had died, and nobody had told him. Hilton’s upbringing in Brighton was modest – his stepfather, also Hungarian, was a builder and his mother a former student – but he won first a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital School and then a place at New College, Oxford to study PPE. (He and Cameron did not meet at university.) His Labour friends say it is his family experience of, and subsequent hatred for, communism that informs his politics, rather than any instinctive love of the Conservative Party. ‘Were it not for what (#litres_trial_promo) the Soviets did to his parents, Steve would be one of us,’ claims a member of Tony Blair’s inner circle. Unfortunately for Labour, however, Harris offered the young Hilton a job at CRD.

Other members of Cameron’s current inner circle to have worked at CRD include Catherine Fall, his gate-keeper, Peter Campbell, who helps him prepare for Prime Minister’s Questions, George Bridges, his political director, and George Osborne, his shadow Chancellor. The latter two arrived after Cameron had left and are not members of his original ‘gang’.

While long-term prospects at CRD may have been good, short-term finances were poor. Cameron’s pay would have been between £10,000 and £12,000 a year when he started and probably not much more when he left after the election of April 1992. The contrast with the incomes of friends who had gleefully signed on with big City firms could hardly have been greater. After university he shared a flat with Pete Czernin, his friend from Eton. The address, 46 Harrington Gardens, was in South Kensington, a red-brick block of the sort favoured by foreign City employees on secondment to London. It was a pad for bachelors of the most eligible sort. As the only son of Mary Czernin, matriarch of the Howard de Walden dynasty, Cameron’s former flatmate can expect a sizeable portion of his family’s £1.5 billion fortune. Czernin, now a film producer, has said suggestions that affluence bought excess are wide of the mark, however. ‘You’re never going to get Dave in a Six-in-a-Bed Supermodel Drug Orgy. Sorry, that’s just not Dave.’ Indeed a guest at a poker party attended by Cameron at around this time remembers him being the only guest to refuse a cannabis joint passed around the card table. His ostentatious refusal was, even then, marked down to political ambition.

What Cameron really enjoyed was a good argument. He had liked ‘sounding off ’ in Oxford, and now, in London and working for the governing party, he was mixing with people even better qualified to match him in debate. He would hone his rhetorical skills in social settings. Several of his friends testify to how much he enjoyed jousting across a dinner table, and sometimes with a degree of antagonism and competitiveness that suggests he was practising with a higher forum in mind. ‘He is infuriating to argue with,’ says his friend James Fergusson, a regular late-night sparring partner. ‘It’s extremely stimulating, but you never win. I know every trick of his. He’ll change the subject. He’ll overwhelm you with statistics. If that doesn’t work, he’ll make a joke or play to the gallery. If he’s losing he’ll never let it remain as one on one, he’ll get other people to giggle on the sidelines. That’s the way it works. It’s infuriating but it’s a very effective political trick.’

He was conscientious at work. Even when it came to Central Office’s drinking culture, Cameron was not one of those who would take boozy lunches or, as one or two did, drink wine at their desks. ‘He was clearly very ambitious,’ recalls a former colleague who joined the CRD some time after Cameron. ‘We all worked hard, but David would really burn the midnight oil.’ It was not long before this serious, good-looking, intelligent man started attracting admiring glances. ‘He was very young, boyish looks, clearly very bright,’ recalls Angie Bray, then the Tories’ head of broadcasting and now the party’s leader in the London assembly.

Caroline Muir, a secretary at the time, remembers: ‘He seemed to be the only human being in the Research Department and he had superb manners.’ Another former Smith Square secretary says: ‘All the girls fancied him – he talked to people. He was always bobbing in and out of his office, willing to pitch in.’

One colleague who took a shine to him was Laura Adshead, whom Cameron had known slightly at Oxford. In common with a number of Cameron’s former girlfriends or close female friends, she is from a diplomatic family. She had been educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College and Christ Church, Oxford before arriving at CCO around the same time as Cameron. The romance began in the spring of 1990 and lasted until summer 1991, although it does not seem to have ended very tidily. ‘I seem to recall the young lady had to be given a period of compassionate leave to recover,’ says one of the couple’s managers at the time. (After her relationship with Cameron, Adshead, a close friend of Whetstone, dated the historian Andrew Roberts. Later she moved to New York, where she underwent a spell as a nun, tending goats and immersing herself in Catholicism, the faith of her birth. She subsequently became a management consultant before returning to London.)

When he had been in Smith Square for several months, an outstanding opportunity presented itself, but one which in later life he may have come to regret. How would Cameron like an all-expenses-paid eight-day trip to South Africa taking in the sights of Durban, Cape Town and Johannesburg? Perhaps with happy memories of his holiday to Kenya, in mind the young adviser, rising fast through the ranks at CRD, said he would like it very much. But South Africa, unlike Kenya, was still under the control of an apartheid regime, pursuing overtly racist policies in defiance of international opinion. At the time Cameron was climbing the ladder in Smith Square, Nelson Mandela had been imprisoned for more than a quarter of a century, and a worldwide campaign (opposed by Margaret Thatcher) to impose economic sanctions on South Africa had become bitterly controversial.

Nonetheless, the trip had been offered to him by his Research Department boss Alistair Cooke and it seemed too good an opportunity to turn down. The fact that Cameron’s godfather, Tim Rathbone, was a passionate opponent of the apartheid regime but was himself opposed to sanctions may also have played a role in sweeping away any qualms Cameron might have had. The trip had been offered to the Research Department by Derek Laud, who fifteen years later was to become known to a wider public as a contestant on Big Brother. But in 1989 he was best known as a fixture on the scene of the Tory far right. That he was both black and gay made him unusual enough, that he was an enthusiastic member of the Monday Club, the anti-immigration group, and liked to ride to hounds ensured that few in Conservative politics were unaware of this flamboyant libertarian.

Laud had started in politics as a research assistant to Michael Brown, at the time the Tory MP for Scunthorpe. Through Brown, Laud had met Cameron’s future father-in-law Sir Reggie Sheffield, a grandee of his local party, with whom he became friends. Other contacts included Michael Colvin and Neil Hamilton, two Tory MPs who were later to become embroiled in the cash-for-questions scandal, partly through their association with Laud. Laud was working as a lobbyist and was employed by Strategy Network International, which had been set up in 1985 specifically to lobby against the imposition of sanctions on South Africa and as a propagandist for Unita, the Angolan opposition group, and for the so-called ‘transitional government’ of Namibia set up in defiance of a UN resolution. Rival lobbyists accused SNI of being controlled by Pretoria. Laud recommended Colvin and Hamilton, who were both recruited as consultants – something they failed to enter properly in the House of Commons register of members’ interests, which came back to haunt them when the cash-for-questions scandal broke in 1994.

According to a contemporary report, one of Colvin’s jobs was:

to identify sympathetic MPs (#litres_trial_promo) who might be interested in what came to be called the ‘Bop run’ – trips, generally all expenses paid, for handpicked Tory MPs to the unrecognised Bophuthatswana ‘homeland’, one of the dumping grounds for the three million black people evicted from their homes in the former South African government’s ‘whitening the cities’ offensive…Appearing before the Select Committee on Members’ Interests in 1989, Ian Findlay, who ran Bophuthatswana’s London office, was asked: ‘Are you satisfied that your government is getting good value for money from visits by British MPs?’ He replied: ‘Yes, very much so.’

There is no suggestion that the trips were not declared in the register, but allegations of a ‘gravy train’, paid for by the apartheid regime, abounded. To the annoyance of the homeland authorities, the form would sometimes be a one-day stop in Bophuthatswana before MPs escaped to a beach holiday in Natal or Cape Town. The usual practice was to offer first-class travel, with the alternative of cashing in a single ticket for two club class seats, enabling MPs to take spouses. A number chose the second option.

Findlay’s full evidence to the committee provides an illustration of the sort of largesse pro-apartheid groups were prepared to dish out to sympathetic Tories. Trips, sometimes led by Colvin himself, would typically last ten days and cost SNI around £2,000 a head in flights, hotels and meals for the fact-finding Tories and their wives, he said.

But it wasn’t just MPs who attracted the attention of the pro-apartheid lobbyists. Laud, who also picked likely targets on behalf of SNI’s clients (they included big mining concerns and other multinationals like Anglo American, Bear Stearns and the South African Chamber of Mines), was delighted to be able to accommodate one of the Tory Party’s bright young things. He invited Cameron to South Africa to‘see for himself’ what effect sanctions would be likely to have on those who were employed in the mines and elsewhere. That the imports of cheap South African coal had helped the Thatcher administration win the miners’ strike would have been an additional attraction for Cameron, who had worked in the CRD’s economic section before being promoted. Alistair Cooke decided that Cameron was a suitable recipient of what he looks back on as ‘simply a jolly’. ‘It was all terribly relaxed, just a little treat, a perk of the job,’ says Cooke. ‘The Botha regime was attempting to make itself look less horrible, but I don’t regard it as having been of the faintest political consequence.’

A senior bureaucrat recalls that the civil service advice about such trips was ‘not to touch them with a barge-pole’. It was also felt inadvisable for special advisers, who were unconstrained by the demands of political neutrality, to accept such deals. But David Cameron, neither a civil servant nor a special adviser, evidently saw no reason to look this gift-horse in the mouth, and spent eight days with Derek Laud, being treated lavishly, visiting mines and factories in Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town. Perhaps inevitably, the prospect of Laud and Cameron spending a week travelling together (a third person was supposed to have gone on the trip with them, but dropped out at the last minute) provoked a degree of tittering in Central Office. Someone remarked that if, after a trip down a mine, Laud suggested having a shower, Cameron was not obliged to accept.

Nelson Mandela was released from prison in February 1990 and was later president for five years, honoured all over the world for his championing of reconciliation. David Cameron visited South Africa as Tory leader in August 2007 in order to meet him. Amid a great fanfare, he announced a major break with Margaret Thatcher’s foreign policy, while keeping noticeably quiet about his own. He advertised himself as being on the side of Mandela and said: ‘The mistakes my party made in the past with respect to relations with the ANC [African National Congress] and sanctions on South Africa make it all the more important to listen now.’ Such talk cannot but be seen, at the very least, as an insurance policy against his earlier visit becoming public knowledge.

Cameron was only in his early twenties when he made the trip. He may defend it now as fact-finding, but it was hardly the act of a vigorous and typical anti-apartheid campaigner. Nor does the list of fellow Tories who made the trip sit well with the new-found liberalism of the modern Conservatives. As Lord Hughes of Woodside, then a central player in the anti-apartheid movement, says, ‘It is almost impossible now to find anyone who wasn’t against apartheid; I wish there were as many opposed to it then as say they were now.’

As might be expected given its school-like atmosphere, the Cameron-era CRD seems to have seen its fair share of shifting allegiances, slammed doors and tearful scenes. As he had done before, Cameron thrived on being ‘one of the gang’. Among those of his peers he admired and could see were going places, he was charming and fun. Those outside the circle did not often see his best side. Some thought him bumptious, others bullying. ‘He had personability, intelligence, ambition and good judgement, but he could be a little sharp-tempered and wasn’t charitably disposed to people who thought differently from him.’ Another colleague was more vehement: ‘He saw it as a way of making himself look good to make other people look stupid. He was a bombastic bully dismissive of those who didn’t agree with him.’

Rupert Morris, author of a book about the Tories, says Cameron ‘had a certain golden-boy aura (#litres_trial_promo) about him. He was sleek and tanned, wore an expensive suit, and his eyes moved impatiently – as if he was unlikely to waste time chatting to anyone unimportant.’ Perhaps as a result of the fall-out from his affair with Adshead, Cameron thereafter dated women outside politics. Bray remembers him arriving at the party’s social functions with ‘various young lovelies’ unknown to the Smith Square set. She recalls Cameron emerging as the pre-eminent figure of their group at this time. A senior figure describes Whetstone as being ‘taut and nervy’, Hilton as an ‘oddball’ (he used to wear a voluminous poncho to work) and Vaizey as ‘idle’. They were all outshone by the self-assured, cool, intelligent and hard-working Cameron.

Michael McCrum, a former headmaster of Eton, has said that Etonians have ‘the priceless art of putting adults at their ease’. But Cameron had something else. Guy Black, director of the CRD’s most important arm, the Political Section, saw in him not only intelligence but a rare political ability – an instinctive feel for opponents’ weak spots and a ruthlessness in exploiting them. Black liked his tactical nous as well as his arrogance. He had quickly moved Cameron out of CRD’s Economic Section to work under him at the Political Section. When, in 1989, Black left to become a special adviser to John Wakeham, the then Energy Secretary, he recommended that Cameron become his successor as its director. Cameron was to have his hands full. A widespread perception that the Thatcher government was ‘out of touch’, open Cabinet warfare over Europe and spiralling interest rates were putting the Prime Minister under real pressure. She had won three elections, had defeated the most powerful unions including the National Union of Mineworkers and had opened up much of the state sector to market forces, but she had made a grave political mistake in introducing the poll tax. The magnitude of that error was brought violently home on 31 March 1990 when a protest by 200,000 people in Trafalgar Square turned into a riot. Electoral defeat for the Tories at the next general election looked a near certainty after a disastrous showing in local polls shortly afterwards.

In early 1990, soon after becoming head of the Political Section, Cameron was invited to a secret conference of the party’s top strategists at Hever Castle, in Kent, to discuss the worsening political climate. There, Cameron became much better acquainted with Andrew Lansley, who was the new director of CRD. Lansley had been a civil servant before entering politics via the British Board of Commerce. But as Norman Tebbit’s private secretary he had proved himself perfectly in tune with his master’s ideology and, when Harris went to Number 10, Lansley was recommended to succeed him.

Lansley was not impressed by what he found on his first day. ‘The Research Department had been gathered together,’ he remembers, ‘almost entirely men, just one woman. I walked into the room and they all stood up. I felt like I had walked into the officers’ mess, it was just bizarre. Clearly this thing worked on a completely different basis.’ He set about modernising the outfit and ordered a fundamental shift in strategy: the CRD began to behave as if the Tories were in opposition, rather than in power. By attacking Neil Kinnock, the leader of the Opposition, reasoned Lansley, the Tories would deflect attention from their own difficulties while knocking the gloss off Labour. ‘I know history moved on but we moved from 20 [percentage] points behind [in the opinion polls] and by September we were in single figures. We had a really good summer being beastly to Labour. And actually through that summer we established a proposition which was very important in the subsequent year, that even though we were eleven years on from Labour 1979, the public still believed in their negative views of Labour, they did not believe that they had changed,’ says Lansley. With Labour nowadays campaigning as if it is in opposition, anxious to prove that its opponents are still extremists, Cameron – as a leading member of Lansley’s CRD – can reasonably claim that he helped write the book on how to ‘attack from office’.

John Major, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Kenneth Baker, who had succeeded Brooke as Conservative Party Chairman, launched the offensive in May 1990 with the Tories in one poll trailing Labour by 15 percentage points. Labour’s policies on the economy, trade unions’ rights, defence and education, and its plans to replace the poll tax with a ‘roof tax’, were all to come under attack. With Cameron right at the heart of the new propaganda factory pumping out negative stories on Labour, he appeared more mature than his peers. ‘I remember when he became head of the political desk he suddenly grew up a lot. He suddenly seemed older than me. He was grown up. The political desk was right at the edge of the battle,’ says Bray. Another colleague recalls Cameron watching television some months earlier when news came in of Nigel Lawson’s resignation as Chancellor. ‘I remember him just coolly observing, “I think Margaret’s done for. I think there will be a stalking horse now” (as there was). David was always more patrician than some of the others. As that remark suggests, he was always a bit detached from the rah-rah stuff.’

Although the summer offensive demonstrated that voters were still suspicious of Labour, it could do little to stop the festering rebellion among Tory MPs, an increasing number of whom were determined to rid themselves of their leader. Change was in the air and Heseltine, the dashing ‘king over the water’ who had garnered credit with every government difficulty, was the pundits’ bet to succeed Thatcher at Number 10. Here it seems Cameron may himself have played a dangerous game. For although the CRD was generally regarded as an ultra-loyal Thatcherite outpost, he was not above pushing Heseltine’s cause on occasion. Bray recalls that when she was stuck for a frontbencher to put up for BBC1’s Question Time, the head of the Political Section casually suggested she ask Heseltine to step in. ‘I said, “Well I’m sure they [Question Time] would love it but officially we’re not supposed to be fielding Michael Heseltine.” But Dave said Michael did these things very well. Funnily enough Dave was always a great fan.’ Bray said that she was impressed that Cameron was ‘thinking outside the box’.

His defiance of orthodoxy (#litres_trial_promo) was less favourably received in an embattled Number 10 where his insouciant recommendation of ‘Tarzan’ marked him out – to some at least – as a Heseltine supporter. It seemed that he had borne out a suspicion harboured among some of Thatcher’s most loyal aides that he was not ‘one of us’. Such apparent disloyalty could have cost the aspiring politician dear had the events of November 1990 fallen differently. Shortly after 9.30 a.m. on 22 November a messenger wordlessly placed a piece of paper on every desk in the CRD. On it was the Press Association ‘snap’ report that Margaret Thatcher had told the Cabinet she was resigning. Cameron watched the unfolding drama of her departure from the press office. Lansley sent a message of condolence from the Research Department (and remarkably received a handwritten note in reply that afternoon).

Cameron has said that (#litres_trial_promo) he was ‘very sad’ that day. But what are we to make of his relations with the Tories’ greatest leader since Winston Churchill? Their meetings have been fleeting and mostly embarrassing. His first encounter with her was at Central Office and might have ended his political career. ‘I was the Trade researcher (#litres_trial_promo) and she asked me what the trade deficit was. I didn’t know,’ he said. On the second occasion, at a lunch, she commiserated with him for the fact that Labour had stolen Tory language, but said that they would never understand the importance of individual liberty under the law. ‘It’s an old tune but a good one (#litres_trial_promo),’ Cameron wrote later. So that Lady Thatcher could give some sort of benediction to young Cameron after he became leader, a ‘casual’ meeting at a party was arranged between the two in early 2006. Cameron, dressed in a jacket and crisp white opennecked shirt, was duly brought before Baroness Thatcher, by now in her eighties and no longer at her physical and mental peak. The young man displayed appropriate deference and thoughtfulness, impressing the elderly former PM and prompting her to inquire for which seat this youthful political aspirant was hoping to stand at the next election. Lady Thatcher, when gently informed of her mistake, is said to have remarked that she could not believe that anyone not wearing a tie could possibly be a Conservative leader. Cameron’s office lost little time in briefing a rather more positive version of the meeting. Lady Thatcher, his press officer said, had told the new leader to make sure he got enough sleep.

Although it may appear trivial, Cameron’s relations with Thatcher go to the heart of the dilemma he faces in positioning at the political centre of a modernised party. He recognises that for many former Tory voters she represents almost all that they grew to dislike about the Conservatives. Yet he was, as university friends confirm, a dyed-in-the-wool Thatcherite himself, and his own parents, especially his father, idolised her. He dare not disown her completely for fear of enraging those that remain her admirers. Her good opinion – and that of those who speak for her – still matters more than Cameron and his supporters like to admit.

In the winter of 1990 it was her successor John Major’s good opinion that mattered most, however. Just as it was important to make a good impression on the new regime, Cameron earned his first press notice – for an embarrassing blunder that earned a rebuke from the Speaker himself. In truth the matter was a minor administrative cockup. Cameron had gone to sit in on a Commons debate on Labour policy one day in January 1991. But instead of taking his place in the seats set aside for party officials in an upper gallery, he had sat in the chamber itself in a box reserved for civil servants. Labour members, spotting the error, let out a howl of indignation and wrote to the then Speaker alleging a ‘potential breach of security’ and demanding that he investigate. A short article in the Guardian, Cameron’s first mention in a national newspaper, records that Speaker Weatherill said: ‘I have received a letter of apology from the Chancellor of the Duchy [of Lancaster, Chris Patten’s job-title in the Cabinet], who accepts personal responsibility that an official of the Conservative party was on the list for the civil servants’ box and was admitted to that box.’ There was no breach of security and the matter was closed.