Cameron: Practically a Conservative. Elliott Francis Perry

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      Nor was Edwards squeamish about the use of corporal punishment in fostering those values. Carrots, as well as sticks, were deployed. A boy who did a good deed or commendable work, or who behaved particularly nicely, would be given what was called an ‘Alpha’. If he won three Alphas, he was given a Plus and a reward. If, though, he misbehaved, he would get an ‘Omega’. Too many of those meant a certain beating – with a clothes brush on the trousers. This would be administered by Edwards, pipe clenched between his teeth. The punishment was followed by a manly handshake as if to wipe the slate clean. ‘It stung a bit,’ remembers Llewellyn, ‘but James Edwards wouldn’t have been unusual in that respect at the time.’ Some crimes carried a beating without question. One Cameron classmate, Rupert Stevenson, remembers that that was his punishment for talking in chapel.

      But to speak to the school’s old boys is to gain the impression that they thrived on defying authority. There was no stigma, physical or otherwise, to being beaten – rather the opposite. Alexander Bathurst says that he and his contemporaries used to ‘see how many petty rules we could break. We weren’t supposed to read comics after lights out, for example, so you could be quite sure that is exactly what we would try to do. But it is still fair to say that you did rather live in awe of the senior masters and matrons.’ One former boy remembers that there was a regular opportunity for misbehaviour, charmingly mild though it was. Early on Sunday evenings, when only one teacher was on duty, boys would tune in to Radio 1 to listen to Alan Freeman’s Pick of the Pops, dancing on desks and chairs, playing air guitar. The Boomtown Rats’ ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’, which topped the UK singles chart in Cameron’s last term at Heatherdown, was a particular favourite.

      Whereas over half a century earlier the actor David Niven had got into trouble with the Heatherdown head – in fact, he was expelled – for a misdemeanour with a marrow, the cause of David Cameron’s downfall was strawberries – or more particularly the strawberries grown by Bar Edwards. Determined groups of small boys, David Cameron prominent among them, repeatedly mounted midnight raids on her kitchen garden, with a view to devouring her produce back in the dorm. This classically jolly jape ensured hours of hilarity spiced with the fear of discovery. Deep into the night, formidable matrons with torches would patrol the sleeping quarters in the knowledge that those whose beds were empty would most likely be found whispering among the soft fruit. Cameron more than once felt the sting of the clothes brush.

      Because it was a small school, all the pupils knew one another, giving an air of intimacy that some more soulless establishments of this type might have lacked. Former Heatherdown boys remember with fondness the woods and the lake. Here, dressed in distinctive green boiler-suits, pupils would make dens, arrange mock fights and generally play. In many respects, it seems to have been idyllic and carefree. ‘It was a very happy place, a great school,’ says Alexander Bathurst. ‘One or two might not have been well suited to it, but the majority would have certainly enjoyed it.’

      Both Cameron boys played for the school’s cricket First XI, Alex with marginally greater accomplishment. David was a stylish, medium-pace bowler with a good eye. ‘He was the sort of person who just knew how to throw a ball,’ said a friend later of the way sports came easily to him. Cricket was his strongest team sport, with rugby his weak spot. ‘He didn’t have the physique of a great sportsman, but he didn’t hang back. He was quite a brave little boy; he wasn’t windy at all,’ recalls one who knew him well.

      Rhidian Llewellyn was dutifully raking a long-jump sandpit on the school’s sports day in 1978 when he was approached by Mrs Gordon Getty. She was making plans for her son Peter (grandson of the oil billionaire John Paul Getty) to invite four classmates to the USA, and would he like to accompany the boys, by way of looking after them? As the young teacher was barely out of school himself and had never flown, he jumped at the opportunity. The trip turned out to be even more lavish than he can have dreamed. One of the lucky four friends of Getty was David Cameron, and such a dizzying glimpse of the high life may have contributed to his perception of wealth. Years later, answering claims that his was a life of privilege, he said he wasn’t rich because he didn’t ‘own a private jet and I have no friends with a private jet’.

      At lunchtime on 21 July 1978, two days after the end of term, Getty, Cameron, Simon Andreae (brother of Giles), Peter Romilly and Fergus Wylie, accompanied by their eighteen-year-old minder Rhidian Llewellyn, boarded BOAC Flight 579 (Concorde, as it happened) at Heathrow to fly to Washington DC. As the excited boys tucked into their caviar, salmon and beef bordelaise, Llewellyn turned round to check that all was well and that his charges were more or less behaving themselves. He was met with the sight, a few rows behind, of David Cameron, eleven years old, cheerily raising a glass of Dom Pérignon ’69 and exclaiming ‘Good health, Sir!’ ‘Sir’, only seven years older than Cameron, was so disbelieving of his own good fortune that he felt it would be churlish to challenge Cameron’s cheek. This willingness to nudge jovially at the barriers of authority (rather than to throw stones at them, for example) comes from Ian Cameron, and generally seems to have been carried off disarmingly. ‘There were times when you needed to tell him to shut up,’ says Llewellyn. ‘Like any ten-year-old, he would get a bit out of line and need a bit of a metaphorical cuffing, but I was never irritated by him and often amused by him.’

      Washington was going through a heatwave that summer, but no matter. For four days the excited boys from the UK were conveyed to all the capital’s most celebrated sights in an air-conditioned Lincoln Convertible. It also took them to a French restaurant where they enjoyed the spectacle of roller-skating waiters. From Washington they went on to a further three days of sight-seeing in New York, where they were based at the Hotel Pierre. The itinerary included the Empire State Building and the World Trade Center. They then flew on to Disneyworld in Florida, roller-coasters and all, and, to celebrate Peter Getty’s twelfth birthday, to the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. Next it was Las Vegas, where the temperatures reached 120ºF, which somewhat curtailed the sight-seeing, restricting them to hanging round the MGM Grand Hotel’s pool and investigating the hotel’s gaming devices. The tour was rounded off with three days at the Grand Canyon, including a helicopter flight, followed by a trip to Hollywood. They regained their bearings with a week based at Pacific Heights, the Getty home overlooking San Francisco’s Golden Gates and Alcatraz.

      At Heatherdown there wasn’t a great push, as there is at many schools nowadays, to get children into a certain public school. It seemed part of the natural order of things that it would go on doggedly churning out boys who got into Eton (and less often Harrow), and it saw no reason to change. The only scholastic pressure that most boys felt came in the last year, when the exam was nearly upon them. But this began to change in the late 1970s. Eton started making greater demands of its pupils and upping its standards. Heatherdown was shaken when one or two boys started to fail the Common Entrance exam (often being taken away to a crammers to retake it, generally with success). David Cameron was fortunate that only at the end of his spell at the school was Common Entrance beginning to be a problem. In any event, he applied himself to the task with what has become his customary efficiency and in the summer of 1979, he was accepted at Eton.