Cameron: Practically a Conservative. Elliott Francis Perry

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 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,’ 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 СКАЧАТЬ