Cameron: Practically a Conservative. Elliott Francis Perry

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СКАЧАТЬ a pot plant growing outside an unpretentious restaurant in central Oxford, presumably because it infringed the members’ exquisite notion of good taste. So they threw it through the window of the restaurant, causing mayhem and distress. The police were called and arrests were made. At this point ‘the Etonians’ (as one present described them) saw no point in getting themselves needlessly into trouble with the law – and ran for it. One who witnessed the event remembers the innocent making hasty excuses: ‘Boris Johnson turned out to be remarkably nippy for a cruiserweight, his bulky torso seen disappearing over Magdalen Bridge on a pair of skinny legs.’ A passing taxi-driver saw two weary revellers and called out, ‘Hop in, they’ve just arrested your mates over there,’ and they drove off into the night. Cameron (‘tired and in need of rest’ according to one eyewitness) had gone to bed before the incident – aware that trouble was brewing.

      At the start of his second year, Cameron joined the Octagon Club, a lower-key affair but one which required members to dress up in yellow-lapelled tailcoats. He was not proposed for Brasenose’s slightly smarter Phoenix Club, one of Oxford’s oldest dining clubs and the successor to the celebrated Hellfire Club. His exclusion from membership of Brasenose’s pre-eminent dining club was on the grounds of insufficient sporting prowess, explained a contemporary. The resentment aroused among those educated at more minor public schools by Cameron’s ease with all members of the college is probably nearer the mark.

      Did he take drugs at Oxford? A heavy-lidded public school friend says: ‘It was never his thing. It was all booze, mostly beer then. I was into smoking dope. He just wasn’t. If he’d wanted it he could have asked me. He was a social boozer, in a perfectly civilised sort of way.’ Giles Andreae says: ‘I couldn’t swear on my life that he never smoked a joint at Oxford, but I saw a lot of him and would be very surprised.’ The ethos of Brasenose indulgence was very much focused on alcohol, a long way from, say, that of Christ Church, where Olivia Channon, the Cabinet minister’s daughter, died at a party in 1986. Cameron’s interest in narcotics seems to have been minimal. As his friend back at Eton had said, he was always ‘measured’. A close friend says that while some of his contemporaries were trying speed, for example, he wasn’t interested. The most he had indulged in was ‘occasionally a joint or something’.

      Cameron’s good looks and unforced charm meant he was rarely short of female attention. He had had lots of girlfriends in his teens and, as one friend put it, ‘he went out with some absolute crackers’. At Oxford, he would go to old-fashioned sherry parties to meet girls. He also went to the Playpen nightclub, which was run by friends and was a popular haunt for those anxious to find likemindedly uninhibited souls. There Cameron would set to work on the opposite sex for what he would call, a little crudely perhaps, an evening’s ‘wooding’. Purely as a precaution, he once felt the need to visit a sexual diseases clinic (this was not, as has been suggested, for an HIV test). On other occasions, he would simply stand at the back, puffing on a Marlboro Lite and chatting with his male friends. Women were attracted, specifically, by his intelligence, his sweetness of nature and his emotional security. Many of his friends speak of how candid, how unEnglish, he is about his emotions. Frequently he will be in tears at the end of a play or film, and be quite open and willing to talk about it. This is no wheeze: he is confident enough not to regard it as a sign of weakness.

      In his first term he dated a girl called Catherine Snow, who was at St Edmund Hall. Snow was notably strong-willed. ‘Dave didn’t have to do much decision-making while he was going out with her,’ says a friend. The most serious of his Oxford girlfriends was Francesca (‘Fran’, as she was known then) Ferguson, a statuesque, artistic and forthright half-German History student. Cameron was, according to a friend, ‘mad about Fran’. She arrived at Oxford having had no serious boyfriend and became a thoroughly worldly and lively character. They started going out shortly before Christmas in their first term and it quickly became a pretty serious affair. The daughter of a peripatetic diplomat, she was very conscious of not being from the same settled Home Counties milieu as Cameron, but they seemed a good pair. ‘I didn’t go skiing with everyone else, or stay in the same house in France as they all did, so I didn’t really feel a part of his very English world,’ she says. ‘I was bored senseless with that party scene in England. He managed to be always comfortable in it but his life had more content. He would read more, think more. He wasn’t one of that bland lot.’

      She invited him to stay with her parents in Kenya in the summer of 1986, prompting him to take a temporary job shifting crates near Newbury to help earn enough money. Both enjoyed the holiday hugely, spending time away on ‘a real safari, with trucks’, and Cameron, having missed his plane home and delayed returning by a week, enjoyed the celebrated (from White Mischief days) Muthaiga Country Club and playing golf with Francesca’s father, John. He impressed her parents with his charm, but there was an initial sticky moment involving her German mother Monika. He brought a present for his hosts of a Monty Python record, presumably thinking it would be something of an ice-breaker, should that be necessary. What he did not recall until the record was playing on the first evening was the North Minehead By-election sketch, which includes a scene of highly dubious taste featuring a ‘Mr Hilter’. Monika Ferguson still remembers with amusement the look of embarrassment on Cameron’s face. Nonetheless, so impressed was she by Cameron’s easy manner and intelligence that she told her daughter one evening, ‘That chap is going to be Prime Minister one day.’ On leaving he won further goodwill by discreetly leaving a tip and a thank-you note for Alice, the Kenyan woman who had cleaned his room.

      Francesca and Cameron went out for nearly eighteen months. She wanted to experiment, but her boyfriend didn’t feel the same. ‘I was too much for him,’ remembers Ferguson, who now runs an architectural practice in Basel, Switzerland. ‘I was too demanding of his time. I wanted to have arguments and be distracted, but when someone is very ambitious and wants to get a First they don’t want someone demanding too much of them, and I think I probably did that. Also, I was quite jealous and would provoke him to try to shake him out of his self-assuredness.’ When Cameron ended the relationship, she was very upset and asked a friend to speak to him on her behalf. The friend remembers he was unshakeable. The relationship was to end. She was also struck by how much he seemed genuinely concerned that Francesca should not feel too hurt.

      Generally he is good at keeping up with old girlfriends, but his relationship with Lisa De Savary, a retiring, sweet-natured girl and daughter of the flamboyant property developer Peter De Savary, did not end well. She fell for Cameron in a big way, but, as a friend puts it, ‘Dave kind of dumped her and she was very cross about it. It all left rather a nasty taste.’ He also went out with Alice Rayman, a student at Wadham, who marked a reversion to type. She became an entertainment lawyer and married the son of Tory politician Tom King.

      Oxford offered plenty of opportunities for Cameron to play sport. He captained the college tennis team, and played cricket (‘badly’, says a staff member), also for the college. He also made the occasional (restful) sortie on to the river. One Saturday towards the end of his second year at Oxford, Cameron invited his sister Clare, then aged fifteen, to visit. She was preparing for exams and Dave thought it would be a good opportunity to show her his new surroundings. She brought along a friend, Jade Jagger, daughter of Rolling Stone Mick Jagger, a fellow pupil at St Mary’s, Calne, whose budding beauty did not pass unnoticed among Dave’s friends. Dave decided to take his little sister and her friend out in a punt in time-honoured fashion. He asked James Fergusson to join them, and he helped contribute to an idyllically innocent afternoon on the river by taking turns with the punt pole and chatting idly. At tea later in the room of James Delingpole, now a journalist, Fergusson played an imperfect version of ‘Satisfaction’ on the guitar, whereupon Jade piped up proudly, ‘My dad wrote that!’ The following Monday, Cameron’s mother Mary received a call at home. It was Mick Jagger, not pleased. ‘What’s all this my daughter’s been getting up to with your son?’ he demanded. ‘You know I don’t approve of bloodsports.’ Mary, dipping lightly into her reserves of breeding and politesse, explained gently that punting is what one does in a punt, and that his daughter had enjoyed an entirely peaceful afternoon punting СКАЧАТЬ