Cameron: Practically a Conservative. Elliott Francis Perry

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СКАЧАТЬ to have on those who were employed in the mines and elsewhere. That the imports of cheap South African coal had helped the Thatcher administration win the miners’ strike would have been an additional attraction for Cameron, who had worked in the CRD’s economic section before being promoted. Alistair Cooke decided that Cameron was a suitable recipient of what he looks back on as ‘simply a jolly’. ‘It was all terribly relaxed, just a little treat, a perk of the job,’ says Cooke. ‘The Botha regime was attempting to make itself look less horrible, but I don’t regard it as having been of the faintest political consequence.’

      A senior bureaucrat recalls that the civil service advice about such trips was ‘not to touch them with a barge-pole’. It was also felt inadvisable for special advisers, who were unconstrained by the demands of political neutrality, to accept such deals. But David Cameron, neither a civil servant nor a special adviser, evidently saw no reason to look this gift-horse in the mouth, and spent eight days with Derek Laud, being treated lavishly, visiting mines and factories in Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town. Perhaps inevitably, the prospect of Laud and Cameron spending a week travelling together (a third person was supposed to have gone on the trip with them, but dropped out at the last minute) provoked a degree of tittering in Central Office. Someone remarked that if, after a trip down a mine, Laud suggested having a shower, Cameron was not obliged to accept.

      Nelson Mandela was released from prison in February 1990 and was later president for five years, honoured all over the world for his championing of reconciliation. David Cameron visited South Africa as Tory leader in August 2007 in order to meet him. Amid a great fanfare, he announced a major break with Margaret Thatcher’s foreign policy, while keeping noticeably quiet about his own. He advertised himself as being on the side of Mandela and said: ‘The mistakes my party made in the past with respect to relations with the ANC [African National Congress] and sanctions on South Africa make it all the more important to listen now.’ Such talk cannot but be seen, at the very least, as an insurance policy against his earlier visit becoming public knowledge.

      Cameron was only in his early twenties when he made the trip. He may defend it now as fact-finding, but it was hardly the act of a vigorous and typical anti-apartheid campaigner. Nor does the list of fellow Tories who made the trip sit well with the new-found liberalism of the modern Conservatives. As Lord Hughes of Woodside, then a central player in the anti-apartheid movement, says, ‘It is almost impossible now to find anyone who wasn’t against apartheid; I wish there were as many opposed to it then as say they were now.’

      As might be expected given its school-like atmosphere, the Cameron-era CRD seems to have seen its fair share of shifting allegiances, slammed doors and tearful scenes. As he had done before, Cameron thrived on being ‘one of the gang’. Among those of his peers he admired and could see were going places, he was charming and fun. Those outside the circle did not often see his best side. Some thought him bumptious, others bullying. ‘He had personability, intelligence, ambition and good judgement, but he could be a little sharp-tempered and wasn’t charitably disposed to people who thought differently from him.’ Another colleague was more vehement: ‘He saw it as a way of making himself look good to make other people look stupid. He was a bombastic bully dismissive of those who didn’t agree with him.’

      Rupert Morris, author of a book about the Tories, says Cameron ‘had a certain golden-boy aura about him. He was sleek and tanned, wore an expensive suit, and his eyes moved impatiently – as if he was unlikely to waste time chatting to anyone unimportant.’ Perhaps as a result of the fall-out from his affair with Adshead, Cameron thereafter dated women outside politics. Bray remembers him arriving at the party’s social functions with ‘various young lovelies’ unknown to the Smith Square set. She recalls Cameron emerging as the pre-eminent figure of their group at this time. A senior figure describes Whetstone as being ‘taut and nervy’, Hilton as an ‘oddball’ (he used to wear a voluminous poncho to work) and Vaizey as ‘idle’. They were all outshone by the self-assured, cool, intelligent and hard-working Cameron.

      Michael McCrum, a former headmaster of Eton, has said that Etonians have ‘the priceless art of putting adults at their ease’. But Cameron had something else. Guy Black, director of the CRD’s most important arm, the Political Section, saw in him not only intelligence but a rare political ability – an instinctive feel for opponents’ weak spots and a ruthlessness in exploiting them. Black liked his tactical nous as well as his arrogance. He had quickly moved Cameron out of CRD’s Economic Section to work under him at the Political Section. When, in 1989, Black left to become a special adviser to John Wakeham, the then Energy Secretary, he recommended that Cameron become his successor as its director. Cameron was to have his hands full. A widespread perception that the Thatcher government was ‘out of touch’, open Cabinet warfare over Europe and spiralling interest rates were putting the Prime Minister under real pressure. She had won three elections, had defeated the most powerful unions including the National Union of Mineworkers and had opened up much of the state sector to market forces, but she had made a grave political mistake in introducing the poll tax. The magnitude of that error was brought violently home on 31 March 1990 when a protest by 200,000 people in Trafalgar Square turned into a riot. Electoral defeat for the Tories at the next general election looked a near certainty after a disastrous showing in local polls shortly afterwards.

      In early 1990, soon after becoming head of the Political Section, Cameron was invited to a secret conference of the party’s top strategists at Hever Castle, in Kent, to discuss the worsening political climate. There, Cameron became much better acquainted with Andrew Lansley, who was the new director of CRD. Lansley had been a civil servant before entering politics via the British Board of Commerce. But as Norman Tebbit’s private secretary he had proved himself perfectly in tune with his master’s ideology and, when Harris went to Number 10, Lansley was recommended to succeed him.

      Lansley was not impressed by what he found on his first day. ‘The Research Department had been gathered together,’ he remembers, ‘almost entirely men, just one woman. I walked into the room and they all stood up. I felt like I had walked into the officers’ mess, it was just bizarre. Clearly this thing worked on a completely different basis.’ He set about modernising the outfit and ordered a fundamental shift in strategy: the CRD began to behave as if the Tories were in opposition, rather than in power. By attacking Neil Kinnock, the leader of the Opposition, reasoned Lansley, the Tories would deflect attention from their own difficulties while knocking the gloss off Labour. ‘I know history moved on but we moved from 20 [percentage] points behind [in the opinion polls] and by September we were in single figures. We had a really good summer being beastly to Labour. And actually through that summer we established a proposition which was very important in the subsequent year, that even though we were eleven years on from Labour 1979, the public still believed in their negative views of Labour, they did not believe that they had changed,’ says Lansley. With Labour nowadays campaigning as if it is in opposition, anxious to prove that its opponents are still extremists, Cameron – as a leading member of Lansley’s CRD – can reasonably claim that he helped write the book on how to ‘attack from office’.

      John Major, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Kenneth Baker, who had succeeded Brooke as Conservative Party Chairman, launched the offensive in May 1990 with the Tories in one poll trailing Labour by 15 percentage points. Labour’s policies on the economy, trade unions’ rights, defence and education, and its plans to replace the poll tax with a ‘roof tax’, were all to come under attack. With Cameron right at the heart of the new propaganda factory pumping out negative stories on Labour, he appeared more mature than his peers. ‘I remember when he became head of the political desk he suddenly grew up a lot. He suddenly seemed older than me. He was grown up. The political desk was right at the edge of the battle,’ says Bray. Another colleague recalls Cameron watching television some months earlier when news came in of Nigel Lawson’s resignation as Chancellor. ‘I remember him just coolly observing, “I think Margaret’s done for. I think there will be a stalking horse now” (as there was). David was always more patrician than some of the others. As that remark suggests, he was always a bit detached from the СКАЧАТЬ