Cameron: Practically a Conservative. Elliott Francis Perry

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СКАЧАТЬ rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">nursery of Tory talent’. ‘The CRD is part of the party machine but subtly superior to the rest of it – in much the same way as the Guards are to the rest of the Army. It is primarily a secretariat to the party when in government, an alternative civil service when in opposition, a supplier of ammunition in elections, and an intelligence-gatherer and disseminator at all times. But its status and influence extends beyond the sum of its functions.’

      Cameron joined at a crucial juncture in the history of the Conservative Party. Just eighteen months earlier, Margaret Thatcher had won a third successive election victory – a feat that hadn’t been achieved for more than a century – but her power was beginning to ebb away. Michael Heseltine had already dealt the first blow by resigning over the Westland affair in 1986 while Cameron was in his first year at Oxford. Tensions over Europe, the direction of economic policy and the political consequences of the poll tax ground away at Thatcher’s waning power base during her third term. With Heseltine a standard around which rebels on the backbenches rallied, Thatcher thought she could at least rely on the total, unswerving loyalty of the Research Department.

      Her speech on 20 September 1988 in Bruges, Belgium, setting her face against a European Union ‘super state’, might have infuriated some parliamentary colleagues. But nowhere would it have been more rapturously received than on the fourth floor of Conservative Central Office, home of the CRD. One of those already there describes a ‘hyper right-wing Zeitgeist’ infecting the young zealots working under Harris and Cooke. Cameron, says his former colleague, quickly fitted in. He showed few signs of disavowing this Zeitgeist, which entailed Thatcher herself being universally and reverentially referred to in private conversation as ‘Mother’.

      The young PPE graduate was handed the Trade and Industry, Energy and Privatisation brief, a respectable if rather dry subject area. He shared an office, 512, with another researcher under the direction of Ian Stewart, head of the Economic Section. The office was one of a number arranged down a long corridor with Harris and Cooke at one end; next in superiority was Guy Black, head of the Political Section, and thereafter offices corresponded roughly to the great Whitehall departments. Thus Cameron, aged twenty-two, was nominally in charge of Conservative Party research into trade and industry policy.

      The formality and hierarchy of the office accommodation reflected the ethos of the CRD, which was run much like a school. A call to see the director or his deputy could be a prelude to a bruising encounter for young men and women more accustomed to being told how clever they were. Set exacting standards, Cameron learned quickly to prepare accurate, succinct papers to order. His facility for writing clear and powerful briefs was honed in CRD, although one of his managers said he showed natural ability from the start. But while the department’s professionalism would stand him in excellent stead, what was really invaluable were his new colleagues.

      It is a remarkable feature of the backroom staff and kitchen cabinet that have surrounded Cameron since he won the leadership that so many worked with him at CRD in the run-up to the 1992 election or shortly afterwards. Just as in the private sphere, where his circle of friends has not greatly widened from those that he made at Eton, so politically he has fashioned a Praetorian guard from early allies and friends. His stint in Smith Square holds many keys to his choices a decade and a half later.

      This ‘gathering of the gang’ is worthy of some scrutiny. The first important contact Cameron made was another Old Etonian graduate of Oxford. Ed Llewellyn, a year older, had been a distant figure at both school and university (where he, unlike the current Tory leader, was active in student politics). Even now that they were colleagues – Llewellyn was handed the tricky European Community brief – his relative seniority put him, initially at least, above the new arrival’s station.

      The next to arrive was another Oxford graduate named Ed with a reputation as a hack. The name Ed Vaizey had become a fixture in Cherwell during his time at Oxford as the student newspaper detailed the exuberant antics of the right-wing son of Lord Vaizey, the eminent economist ennobled by Harold Wilson in his infamous ‘lavender list’ of 1976 (allegedly for advising Marcia Falkender on her sons’ education), and Marina Vaizey, the art critic. Both Vaizey and Llewellyn had already done some voluntary work for the CRD before going up to Oxford and so had an ‘in’ with Cooke and Harris that Cameron did not. But on arrival at CRD in early 1989 Vaizey found himself junior to Cameron just as Cameron was junior to Llewellyn by dint of length of service. Not himself the retiring sort, the young Vaizey was immediately struck by how at ease Cameron already appeared around even very senior politicians.

      Although Vaizey was to become a friend and ally, the next two figures on the scene are the most important for Cameron’s political development. In ideological terms – as well as in any other – Rachel Whetstone is a thoroughbred. Her grandfather was Sir Antony Fisher, an Eton-educated former RAF officer who made millions from the introduction of intensive chicken farming to Britain from the US and used part of the proceeds to fund right-wing think-tanks. Organisations like the Institute of Economic Affairs, which he founded and chaired, helped inject the ideas of Frederick Hayek and Milton Friedman into the political mainstream across the world. Sir Antony died just before his granddaughter started working at CRD but his daughter, Rachel’s mother Linda Whetstone, remains an influential figure on the libertarian right. Rachel’s father, Francis Whetstone, is a Conservative councillor in East Sussex. Their daughter was raised in the couple’s manor house near Wealden, and was educated first at Benenden and then at Bristol University. Socially, as well as politically, Cameron and Whetstone were cut from the same cloth and it was not surprising that the two became friends soon after she joined the CRD in early 1989.

      A far more unlikely addition to the set arrived three months later. Small, cocky, shaven-headed and foreign-born, Steve Hilton blew through the doors of the Conservative Party on the back of a hurricane. The young undergraduate was processing claims from the Great Storm in early 1988 in a Brighton insurance firm. It was tedious work for an intelligent man and he happened to see a party political broadcast in which Peter Brooke, then Tory Party chairman, invited any viewers who wanted to help the Conservative Party to dial 01 222 9000. He dialled the number and some months later found himself working as a volunteer in the CRD’s library – an early and personal lesson, perhaps, in the power of political advertising.

      Something about Hilton impressed Harris that summer. Perhaps he was taken with the fact that he had made a conscious choice to join the Tories, rather than being born into the party. Hilton’s mother and father had moved from Hungary to Britain in the mid-1960s not, as has been reported, to flee the Soviet repression of 1956 but to further their education. Nor did the surname come from the first hotel they stayed in on arrival: Hilton thinks his father chose it because it was a close approximation of his real name, Hircsak. His parents’ relationship did not withstand the move and his father moved back to his homeland. At the age of twelve, upset that letters to his father were no longer being answered, Hilton set out to visit him during a holiday to see his mother’s family in Hungary. Having caught the train to Budapest alone, he went to his father’s last known address and discovered the sad truth. His father had died, and nobody had told him. Hilton’s upbringing in Brighton was modest – his stepfather, also Hungarian, was a builder and his mother a former student – but he won first a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital School and then a place at New College, Oxford to study PPE. (He and Cameron did not meet at university.) His Labour friends say it is his family experience of, and subsequent hatred for, communism that informs his politics, rather than any instinctive love of the Conservative Party. ‘Were it not for what the Soviets did to his parents, Steve would be one of us,’ claims a member of Tony Blair’s inner circle. Unfortunately for Labour, however, Harris offered the young Hilton a job at CRD.

      Other members of Cameron’s current inner circle to have worked at CRD include Catherine Fall, his gate-keeper, Peter Campbell, who helps him prepare for Prime Minister’s Questions, George Bridges, his political director, and George Osborne, his shadow Chancellor. The latter two arrived after Cameron had left and are not СКАЧАТЬ