Cameron: Practically a Conservative. Elliott Francis Perry

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СКАЧАТЬ been good, short-term finances were poor. Cameron’s pay would have been between £10,000 and £12,000 a year when he started and probably not much more when he left after the election of April 1992. The contrast with the incomes of friends who had gleefully signed on with big City firms could hardly have been greater. After university he shared a flat with Pete Czernin, his friend from Eton. The address, 46 Harrington Gardens, was in South Kensington, a red-brick block of the sort favoured by foreign City employees on secondment to London. It was a pad for bachelors of the most eligible sort. As the only son of Mary Czernin, matriarch of the Howard de Walden dynasty, Cameron’s former flatmate can expect a sizeable portion of his family’s £1.5 billion fortune. Czernin, now a film producer, has said suggestions that affluence bought excess are wide of the mark, however. ‘You’re never going to get Dave in a Six-in-a-Bed Supermodel Drug Orgy. Sorry, that’s just not Dave.’ Indeed a guest at a poker party attended by Cameron at around this time remembers him being the only guest to refuse a cannabis joint passed around the card table. His ostentatious refusal was, even then, marked down to political ambition.

      What Cameron really enjoyed was a good argument. He had liked ‘sounding off ’ in Oxford, and now, in London and working for the governing party, he was mixing with people even better qualified to match him in debate. He would hone his rhetorical skills in social settings. Several of his friends testify to how much he enjoyed jousting across a dinner table, and sometimes with a degree of antagonism and competitiveness that suggests he was practising with a higher forum in mind. ‘He is infuriating to argue with,’ says his friend James Fergusson, a regular late-night sparring partner. ‘It’s extremely stimulating, but you never win. I know every trick of his. He’ll change the subject. He’ll overwhelm you with statistics. If that doesn’t work, he’ll make a joke or play to the gallery. If he’s losing he’ll never let it remain as one on one, he’ll get other people to giggle on the sidelines. That’s the way it works. It’s infuriating but it’s a very effective political trick.’

      He was conscientious at work. Even when it came to Central Office’s drinking culture, Cameron was not one of those who would take boozy lunches or, as one or two did, drink wine at their desks. ‘He was clearly very ambitious,’ recalls a former colleague who joined the CRD some time after Cameron. ‘We all worked hard, but David would really burn the midnight oil.’ It was not long before this serious, good-looking, intelligent man started attracting admiring glances. ‘He was very young, boyish looks, clearly very bright,’ recalls Angie Bray, then the Tories’ head of broadcasting and now the party’s leader in the London assembly.

      Caroline Muir, a secretary at the time, remembers: ‘He seemed to be the only human being in the Research Department and he had superb manners.’ Another former Smith Square secretary says: ‘All the girls fancied him – he talked to people. He was always bobbing in and out of his office, willing to pitch in.’

      One colleague who took a shine to him was Laura Adshead, whom Cameron had known slightly at Oxford. In common with a number of Cameron’s former girlfriends or close female friends, she is from a diplomatic family. She had been educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College and Christ Church, Oxford before arriving at CCO around the same time as Cameron. The romance began in the spring of 1990 and lasted until summer 1991, although it does not seem to have ended very tidily. ‘I seem to recall the young lady had to be given a period of compassionate leave to recover,’ says one of the couple’s managers at the time. (After her relationship with Cameron, Adshead, a close friend of Whetstone, dated the historian Andrew Roberts. Later she moved to New York, where she underwent a spell as a nun, tending goats and immersing herself in Catholicism, the faith of her birth. She subsequently became a management consultant before returning to London.)

      When he had been in Smith Square for several months, an outstanding opportunity presented itself, but one which in later life he may have come to regret. How would Cameron like an all-expenses-paid eight-day trip to South Africa taking in the sights of Durban, Cape Town and Johannesburg? Perhaps with happy memories of his holiday to Kenya, in mind the young adviser, rising fast through the ranks at CRD, said he would like it very much. But South Africa, unlike Kenya, was still under the control of an apartheid regime, pursuing overtly racist policies in defiance of international opinion. At the time Cameron was climbing the ladder in Smith Square, Nelson Mandela had been imprisoned for more than a quarter of a century, and a worldwide campaign (opposed by Margaret Thatcher) to impose economic sanctions on South Africa had become bitterly controversial.

      Nonetheless, the trip had been offered to him by his Research Department boss Alistair Cooke and it seemed too good an opportunity to turn down. The fact that Cameron’s godfather, Tim Rathbone, was a passionate opponent of the apartheid regime but was himself opposed to sanctions may also have played a role in sweeping away any qualms Cameron might have had. The trip had been offered to the Research Department by Derek Laud, who fifteen years later was to become known to a wider public as a contestant on Big Brother. But in 1989 he was best known as a fixture on the scene of the Tory far right. That he was both black and gay made him unusual enough, that he was an enthusiastic member of the Monday Club, the anti-immigration group, and liked to ride to hounds ensured that few in Conservative politics were unaware of this flamboyant libertarian.

      Laud had started in politics as a research assistant to Michael Brown, at the time the Tory MP for Scunthorpe. Through Brown, Laud had met Cameron’s future father-in-law Sir Reggie Sheffield, a grandee of his local party, with whom he became friends. Other contacts included Michael Colvin and Neil Hamilton, two Tory MPs who were later to become embroiled in the cash-for-questions scandal, partly through their association with Laud. Laud was working as a lobbyist and was employed by Strategy Network International, which had been set up in 1985 specifically to lobby against the imposition of sanctions on South Africa and as a propagandist for Unita, the Angolan opposition group, and for the so-called ‘transitional government’ of Namibia set up in defiance of a UN resolution. Rival lobbyists accused SNI of being controlled by Pretoria. Laud recommended Colvin and Hamilton, who were both recruited as consultants – something they failed to enter properly in the House of Commons register of members’ interests, which came back to haunt them when the cash-for-questions scandal broke in 1994.

      According to a contemporary report, one of Colvin’s jobs was:

      to identify sympathetic MPs who might be interested in what came to be called the ‘Bop run’ – trips, generally all expenses paid, for handpicked Tory MPs to the unrecognised Bophuthatswana ‘homeland’, one of the dumping grounds for the three million black people evicted from their homes in the former South African government’s ‘whitening the cities’ offensive…Appearing before the Select Committee on Members’ Interests in 1989, Ian Findlay, who ran Bophuthatswana’s London office, was asked: ‘Are you satisfied that your government is getting good value for money from visits by British MPs?’ He replied: ‘Yes, very much so.’

      There is no suggestion that the trips were not declared in the register, but allegations of a ‘gravy train’, paid for by the apartheid regime, abounded. To the annoyance of the homeland authorities, the form would sometimes be a one-day stop in Bophuthatswana before MPs escaped to a beach holiday in Natal or Cape Town. The usual practice was to offer first-class travel, with the alternative of cashing in a single ticket for two club class seats, enabling MPs to take spouses. A number chose the second option.

      Findlay’s full evidence to the committee provides an illustration of the sort of largesse pro-apartheid groups were prepared to dish out to sympathetic Tories. Trips, sometimes led by Colvin himself, would typically last ten days and cost SNI around £2,000 a head in flights, hotels and meals for the fact-finding Tories and their wives, he said.

      But it wasn’t just MPs who attracted the attention of the pro-apartheid lobbyists. Laud, who also picked likely targets on behalf of SNI’s clients (they included big mining concerns and other multinationals like Anglo American, Bear Stearns and the South African Chamber of Mines), was delighted to be able to accommodate СКАЧАТЬ