Pride and privilege (So London)

Cameron: the Rise of the New Conservative by Francis Elliot and James Hanning, Fourth Estate, £18.99

Until page 218 of this book, not only would I not have voted for him, but I would have liked to throttle David Cameron. Inevitably with a man who is so young and who has done relatively little, Cameron is more of an extended profile than a biography. Even so, in its outlines I saw a world that – naively – I thought had died some time ago, a world of titles, silver spoons, old school ties and exclusive dining clubs.

It goes like this. Boy Cameron begins life in a large Queen Anne rectory in Wiltshire, where he experiences an ‘Eden of cricket matches and gambolling’ in the bosom of a family which is described by a friend as ‘very wholesome, but not in a boring way’, thus subverting Tolstoy’s famous maxim about all happy families being alike. He is ‘sweet’, ‘well adjusted’, endearing, courteous, stimulating and – most galling of all – an ‘expert kisser’ at the age of 13.

The envious can only hope he learned his snogging at Heatherdown prep school, where the royal princes also attended, and where the parents’ evenings were like a roll-call from Debrett’s. There he meets the youngest Getty, whose birthday Cameron and several other gilded pubescents celebrate with a trip on Concorde to America, taking in New York, Walt Disney World in Florida, Cape Canaveral, Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon and Hollywood. Then it’s Eton, about which I cannot be bothered to write a single word, then Oxford and the Bullingdon Club, where Cameron is never quite in the frame for pot-plant throwing or window-smashing (as Boris Johnson seems to have been) or, indeed, for cocaine-snorting, but where he does study hard and go punting with Jade Jagger.

Family connections get ‘Dave’ a placement with Jardine Matheson in Hong Kong; a royal equerry’s unsolicited testimonial assists the Conservative Party in making up its mind to give him his first proper job; and his prospective mother-in-law Annabel Astor (whose country place is called Ginge Manor) phones up her mate Michael Green, the boss of Carlton TV, and wangles Dave his next posting as the sharp-clawed amanuensis of the appalling media chief. The rest of his time Dave spends plotting his parliamentary entry in right-wing dining clubs, on safari and touring Tuscany.

So there we go. This is Phineas Finn as written by PG Wodehouse: a world of killer Woosters planning the retaking of Britain from the grounds of Ginge Manor. The effortless privilege of Cameron’s first 30 years is echoed in the authors’ own minor snobberies. ‘Tall, stately and sure of herself, Mary (Cameron’s mother) is a typical Mount.’ What on God’s earth is ‘a typical Mount’? Maybe she has trees up to the snowline.

Rich, privileged, an expert kisser – how could you not hate him? Nor are there any real pratfalls. There’s the one cannabis incident, absolutely no sign of the much-rumoured coke-snorting and one odd, laconically described, incident in which ‘purely as a precaution he once felt the need to visit a sexual diseases clinic’ (were there symptoms? We never find out). The worst that happened was a light beating or two at Heatherdown where, in a wonderful authorial coupling, the headmaster was apparently not ‘squeamish about the use of corporal punishment in fostering those values. Carrots as well as sticks were used.’ One hopes that the carrots were buttered.

None of this, of course, tells you anything about whether David Cameron would or would not make a good Prime Minister. But instinct cries out for someone who has had to try. And then, on page 218, the picture changes. It oughtn’t to, but it does. This is when David and Samantha Cameron, the golden couple, realise that their new baby son, Ivan, is making unusual jerking movements. Ivan then suffers a major seizure in front of a doctor in hospital, and shortly afterwards the Camerons are told he will probably never walk or talk. In fact, it’s worse than that: Ivan cannot move, crawl, or hold on to anything and has even lost his ability to smile. He sometimes screams uncontrollably in the night, he must be fed by a tube in his stomach, and the Camerons have to spend much of their time in hospital with him. Of course, Cameron’s suffering, which I now compute to have gone well beyond mine, is not a reason to vote for him either. Far more profound thinking than that is required, such as noticing (thanks to this admirably terse book) that his grandfather once lived in a castle called Blairmore. As may we all.

Comments

[KevinB]

At first,I was intrigued that someone at Buck House rang up Tory Central Office, and out of the blue suggested ( or, is that solicited )that young David would be just the chap for the 'job'. What is even more surprising is that those at Tory C.O., immediately, and one would gather, unthinkingly, complied.

Classless society, nope.

[michael]

So, Kevin B, if you come from a particular class you should be discouraged from seeking high office. Classless Society? Nope.

[Don]

Pardon me for being a bit of a misanthrope, but if we're really fortunate we'll hit the trifecta of image: Cameron in the UK, Barack Obabma as the US President, and Royal as French President.

My God have mercy on our souls.....