Cameron: Practically a Conservative. Elliott Francis Perry

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СКАЧАТЬ and a complete travesty that someone as mediocre as Dave Cameron can get a distinction.’ Cameron also sat the Scholarship Level exam in Economics and Politics and received a 1 grade. (He failed to turn up for another S-level exam in History, and so earned himself an X, for no score.) Having not been a likely Oxbridge candidate at all, he was now a strong one. Politics had become his forte, and his tutors were well placed to advise him on which college he should aim for. Tim Card and John Clark at Eton had connections with Brasenose College and encouraged Cameron to apply to read Politics, Philosophy and Economics. ‘We wanted him to do well and it was a very good place to do PPE,’ remembers John Clark, citing the presence of its politics tutor, the prolific Vernon Bogdanor, who, in addition to enjoying a good reputation in academic circles as a scholar, had something of a name in the wider world.

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

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

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

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

      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.

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