Cameron: Practically a Conservative. Elliott Francis Perry

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ