Cameron: Practically a Conservative. Elliott Francis Perry

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СКАЧАТЬ running the Wasing estate, employed thirty-two men to look after his 500 acres and a further fifteen servants to staff the house and attend to his six young children. One of these children was William Arthur Mount (educated at Eton and New College, Oxford, and also a barrister), who in 1900 succeeded his ailing father, unopposed, as Conservative MP for Newbury, before losing it to the Liberal candidate six years later. ‘Billy’ worked diligently and regained the seat in 1910, frequently speaking out against Home Rule for Ireland, until he stood down twelve years later. He continued in public life as chairman of Berkshire County Council and as chairman of the South Berkshire Hunt. He was made a baronet in June 1921 and died in 1930 at the age of sixty-four. He had three sons, the eldest of whom, William Malcolm Mount (the second baronet, known as Bill), succeeded to the title at the age of twenty-six.

      ‘W.M.’ was David Cameron’s grandfather. He too was educated at Eton and New College, Oxford, where he played cricket with Alec Douglas-Home, later to become Prime Minister. He was a keen fisherman and horseman and became joint master of the South Berks hounds and chairman of Newbury Conservative Association. He had three daughters, the middle of whom, Mary, was born in 1934. As a lieutenant colonel he fought impressively in the war with the 61st Reconnaissance Regiment (Royal Armoured Corps), but was invalided out, having been shot in the thigh the day after D Day. His wife Lady Nancy was also active, taking a leading organisational and welfare role in the Women’s Land Army, a loosely structured band of 200,000 women who worked ploughing, dung-spreading and threshing. During the war, the young Mary, her two sisters and mother moved out of the big house at Wasing, which was to be used by evacuees from London, to a neighbouring farm. In February 1945, Wasing Place was virtually burned to the ground and many works of art were lost. Two years later, possibly in part to help pay for the restoration, W.M. placed over a thousand acres of family land at Thatcham on the market. Mary’s mother Nancy took a prominent role in the rebuilding of Wasing Place, and eventually she and her husband returned to the house that the Mount family had owned for nearly 200 years.

      In 1947, William Mount served as Sheriff of Berkshire, the fourth Mount in 170 years to hold the title. He was also president of the Newbury Show, a governor of the Royal Agricultural College at Cirencester and served on the Council of the County Landowners Association, which enabled him to sustain his interest in timber. He was also appointed Berkshire County Scout president and originated the Berkshire Supporters of Scouting, which raised money for Scout troops, as well as opening up the Wasing estate for use by Scout camps. In 1952, in a comparable act of public-spiritedness, ‘Lieutenant Colonel Sir’ William Mount took command of the 3rd South Berkshire Home Guard, which aimed to afford some protection to the civilian population in the event of a nuclear attack. The proximity of Aldermaston, the home of Britain’s nuclear weapons, and the political protests that accompanied its setting up in 1950, may have had a good deal to do with that.

      Mary’s cousin Ferdinand Mount, a journalist and former adviser to the Thatcher government (who inherited but does not use the title), confirms the impression offered by the family history: ‘The Mounts are very old fashioned, slightly stiff, you might say…They had a very comfortable upbringing. They were churchgoing, I don’t think any of them have ever been divorced. They are straitlaced and full of a sense of duty.’ But let those who are suspicious of parvenu politicians be further reassured. W. G. Mount’s mother was a Talbot, as was the first Earl of Shrewsbury, John Talbot, who, in his late seventies, died with his two sons in the final battle of the Hundred Years War. The admiring French called him the ‘the English Achilles’. The journalist William Rees-Mogg, no less, calls the Talbots ‘one of the great families’ of English history, like the Cecils or the Churchills, only much older. Among the later Talbots were one of Sir Robert Walpole’s Lord Chancellors, a Bishop of Durham, a Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, another medieval Archbishop of Dublin, the great building heiress Bess of Hardwick, and William Fox-Talbot, inventor of photography.

      There was even a Talbot who became Prime Minister, or the equivalent (before the title was coined). Charles Talbot, the 12th Earl and the first and only Duke of Shrewsbury, born in 1660, did several stints as First Minister, first under William III in 1689, after the Glorious Revolution, and again under Queen Anne and yet again under George I. How did he do it? According to Rees-Mogg’s researches, by charm and moderation. Dean Swift called Shrewsbury ‘the finest gentleman we have’, while Bishop Burnet wrote that he had ‘a sweetness of temper that charmed all who knew him’. Women loved him. A political moderate, he was decisive when the revolutionary situation required it, but was one of those politicians who stand above parties and are seen as relatively non-partisan.

      David Cameron was born on 9 October 1966. In a typically Mountian display of honour towards their forebears, the parents gave the newborn the names of their fathers, William and Donald. He was Ian and Mary’s third child. Their first, Alexander, had been born the year after their marriage (and had been given the Christian names of Ian’s uncle), with their second, Tania, arriving nineteen months later. The latest Cameron was christened at Wasing, attended by his godparents Tim Rathbone and Ben Glazebrook, Ian’s friends from Eton, and Fiona Aird, a former flatmate of Mary. Also present was John Sumner, with his wife Heather, also old friends of Mary. With three children under the age of four, Mary had her hands full, but she had help, and of a singularly old-fashioned and British kind.

      Gwen Hoare is a key figure in the life of both Mary and David Cameron. Born just west of Swindon, the daughter of a market gardener, she had been ‘in service’ with the Mount family all her adult life, had never married, and had looked after Mary – thirteen years her junior – as she was growing up. For nearly twenty years after the war, she lived in a variety of houses at Wasing. Then, in her early forties, she moved to join the family in Phillimore Place, Kensington, to help look after Alexander.

      When, in 1969, the family moved to Peasemore, a village in Berkshire, Gwen Hoare moved with them. The move required Ian Cameron to make the daily train trek from Didcot Parkway to the City of London, where he added a directorship of the estate agency firm John D. Wood to his work for Panmure Gordon. It meant leaving the house before seven in the morning, and not returning until after seven in the evening. Mary Cameron meanwhile was often out, sitting as JP in Newbury, or doing other good works locally. It was, therefore, David Cameron’s nanny who oversaw much of his early upbringing. ‘Gwen pretty much brought them up,’ says a family friend. ‘She was always a hugely important figure in that house,’ says another. ‘She was much more than an old-fashioned nanny. She was a real rock in that family, as if there weren’t enough already.’ Five years after the birth of David, Mary was delivered of her fourth child, Clare, and Gwen Hoare had another charge. By this stage the second son had followed his brother in attending Greenwood pre-preparatory school near Newbury, and was driven there every day by a rota of local mothers.

      Lying six miles north of Newbury, there can be no more quintessentially English country village than Peasemore. At its centre is the church of St Barnabas, built in the eighteenth century and embellished a hundred years later. And the Cameron family are central to the life of the church – Ian Cameron used to be a church warden, and Mary remains on the flower-arranging and cleaning rotas. Little wonder that David, who was brought up in the splendid Queen Anne rectory close by, has said, ‘When I think of home, I think of church.’ Home was decidedly old-fashioned if not notably bookish (‘They are very county,’ explains one friend). Dinner was served upon the return of Ian Cameron promptly at 7.45 p.m. His children, once old enough to graduate from tea with their nanny, were expected to display immaculate manners. It was a house, recalls a guest, that still played parlour games. After dinner parties ‘the ladies’ would withdraw to another room. But the Old Rectory was also hospitable, its swimming pool and tennis court always at the disposal of the children’s friends (if not of other villagers, a cause of resentment among some).

      From the youngest age, David Cameron lacked bashfulness. ‘He was very articulate,’ says a friend. ‘I remember him liking a good argument. He was quite precocious from a very young age. He certainly СКАЧАТЬ