Cameron: Practically a Conservative. Elliott Francis Perry

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СКАЧАТЬ spent his second year living in college, with a big, panelled sitting room and tiny, cold bedroom, Cameron’s third and final year was spent living at 69 Cowley Road, sharing with Giles Andreae, his friend from earliest times, Sarah Hamilton (a product of St Paul’s Girls School, who was studying law) and David Granger, a popular sportsman, now in television. While the pressure was on for the keen student anxious to get a First, Cameron continued to enjoy himself. The house had a laid-back flavour, and benefited from his enthusiastic efforts in the kitchen, often to cook the odd Peasemore pheasant for an informal dinner party. ‘He would always be very concerned that you were enjoying yourself, and then if you were he would be full of self-mocking praise for himself,’ remembers a friend.

      ‘There was a fair amount of beer and wine about,’ says Giles Andreae, ‘but it certainly wasn’t a house full of ravers.’ They would use the local kebab van a good deal, as well as the Hi-Lo, a cheap Jamaican restaurant directly opposite their house patronised by generations of undergraduates. There Cameron, Andreae and their friends would go once or twice a week – sometimes late at night – for goat curries, funky chicken and Red Stripe lager, served up by the Rastafarian chef– owner Hugh Anderson, who is also remembered for his over-proof rum. ‘He was a happy, easy-going character, quite pleasant,’ remembers Andy, as the Rastafarian is known to everyone. ‘He was very modest and very orderly, not a wild guy at all.’ So orderly were Cameron and Andreae that Andy would hand over his one-year-old son Daniel to the two undergraduates to look after. The little boy was known, a little distantly perhaps, as ‘boy child’. Cameron and Andreae would bounce him on their knees as they watched daytime television when Andy was busy in the kitchen over the road. Cameron, for one, made a point of never missing Going for Gold, a programme presented by Henry Kelly, which he may have omitted to mention in some of his subsequent job interviews.

      One Lent term, he was chosen, as a guinea pig, to spend five weeks at Stanford University. Friends say it was five of the most enjoyable weeks of his life. He shared a room with two Americans and was required to do pretty well no work. Camilla Cavendish, now a journalist with The Times, who followed in his footsteps a year later, says that the Americans had all adored Cameron, not least for his accent. ‘I got the impression I was a big let-down after Dave,’ she says.

      It is said that Cameron is notably loyal to his friends – one says his dependability is the best of his many assets – but in a milieu as privileged as his, where the going was pretty well always good, there might not be a great many opportunities to show it. Yet Giles Andreae was a beneficiary of his – and his parents’ – steadfastness. During their last year at Oxford, he was found – after several wrong diagnoses – to have Hodgkin’s disease. The delay in the diagnosing of the cancer required him to have intensive chemotherapy, sedatives and steroids, as well as a variety of experimental drugs. For each bout of chemotherapy, he had to undergo a general anaesthetic and was left debilitated and low.

      Andreae’s survival was a matter of touch and go for some months. To help him recover his strength after the treatment, Cameron would drive his friend to his parents’ house at Peasemore in a battered Volvo he owned as a student. ‘Dave used to take me down in his car, tuck me up in bed and give me some videos,’ says Andreae, who would then stay for two or three days until he was strong enough to go back to Oxford. ‘Dave, despite it being the middle of finals, would pop by to say hello, and managed to find some humour in a pretty grim situation. He was a very supportive friend, but it was typical of his family to do that.’

      On the night of 11 June 1987 Cameron held a party in his college room to celebrate Margaret Thatcher’s third successive election victory. It was a rare political act at university. While future Tory stars like Michael Gove, Boris Johnson, Mark Field, Ed Llewellyn and Ed Vaizey threw themselves into student politics, either at the Oxford Union or in the Oxford University Conservative Association, Cameron stayed on the sidelines, rather as he had at Eton. He would go along to hear a big-name speaker, but he took little part. His non-participation irks some fellow Tories. One contemporary, who remains active in politics, said: ‘You might think it a little strange that at the time – the height of Thatcherism, when just a year before there had been busloads of left-wing students going to the miners’ strike – he wasn’t galvanised.’ Cameron, as an implicit, deeply tribal Tory, felt little need to prove he was a Conservative. Another student politician contemporary says that Cameron was ‘too cool for school’. Steve Rathbone says he and Cameron shared a distaste for serious political discourse, particularly with opponents. ‘The trouble with some of the lefties was not that they were left wing – that was fine – but that they were earnest and humourless. They were too po-faced and didn’t know when to park their ideology outside. Dave and I did use to bait them a bit about that.’

      That Cameron was not active in student politics is not to say that he did not have a definite view. ‘Dave’s politics were very much centrist Tory,’ says Rathbone. ‘He was very mistrustful of the Monday Club types who were always banging on about how Mandela [then still in prison] was a terrorist.’ Later Rathbone, as the elected president of Brasenose Junior Common Room (JCR), had to escort John Carlisle of the Monday Club into the college. ‘Neither of us had any sympathy with Carlisle’s views and I didn’t like the guy, but there was a student demo about it, with a tangible level of hatred against him, spit flying and everything. It was really unpleasant, much worse than the standard sort of student demo. Dave was flat against that sort of thing.’

      While David Cameron supported the right of Carlisle to speak – against the opposition of his friend Andrew Feldman – he was at least consistent in his libertarianism. In March 1987 he caused some unhappiness among those who felt he was not pulling his weight ideologically when, during one of his generally passive encounters with the Union, he supported the decision to allow Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams to speak there. Cameron’s view was that he should be allowed to have his say and that his audience should be able to make an informed judgement, in favour or against. He tried this line on his tutor Vernon Bogdanor, who disagreed, saying that Sinn Fein’s relationship with the IRA was unhealthily close and that the normal democratic rules should not apply. Having heard Adams speak, Cameron told a friend that he felt ‘grubby’ about listening to the Northern Irishman, and that Bogdanor had been right.

      Academically, Vernon Bogdanor would have been an ideal person to stimulate Cameron’s learning. He was among a number of Oxford academics who, disenchanted with what they saw as a damaging leftward move by the Labour Party, had joined the newly formed centrist Social Democratic Party. Bogdanor, who in some ways had helped provide some of the intellectual underpinning of the new party, was ideally placed to challenge his star pupil’s assumptions. Further, he preferred to be challenged by his students, so Cameron had every opportunity to fight his corner on, say, the rights and wrongs of the electoral system. Bogdanor has spoken of Cameron’s old-fashioned, highly pragmatic approach to politics. While he had leanings towards Euro-scepticism, he tended to approach problems on a ‘whatever works’ basis.

      His Economics tutor, Peter Sinclair, remembers: ‘Typically when David was debating he would take a more pro-market view than a number of them.’ Sinclair would encourage his students to take the pure ‘market’ position as a point of reference and ‘pep it up with very recent, interesting, controversial stuff, typically from American academics, stuff about to be published, or really good working papers, which they would have read, and try to avoid clichés. Don’t just come up with slogans, really think. And he was exceptionally good at that.’ Again, the Cameron manner seems to have made his message more palatable. ‘I can remember some of his interventions,’ says Sinclair. ‘He’d say, “Hang on, you can’t really say that – look at the stats.” He’d always put it very nicely. He was rather keener than the others on the logic of what the market would lead to and slightly less concerned with the wrinkles that could justify a different view. He was quite freethinking and would not tend to take a standard view. His views were on the whole a bit more to the right than most of the others.’

      John Foster, his Philosophy don, said he was very clever, but showed СКАЧАТЬ