Cameron: Practically a Conservative. Elliott Francis Perry

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ away from home from the age of seven. Six and a half centuries of history crowd around new arrivals. Cameron, short for his age and a little overweight, could at least take refuge in a room of his own, his first private space either at home or at school. This was in John Faulkner’s house, JF, situated near the end of Eton’s Common Lane, one of twenty-five houses of around fifty boys each that make up the school. Each one is its own universe, a more intimate home from the buffetings of the wider school. The refuge of having one’s own room is not unassailable, but an Eton boy can generally shut out as much of the rest of the world as he wants. To a newcomer, this can be invaluable, a quiet place to learn the school’s arcane names, rules and acronyms and for coming to terms with wearing a tailcoat every school day for five years.

      One of the distinctive features of Eton is ‘private business’, when a handful of boys meet a master – known, in the first three years, as their Classical Tutor – allocated to them for a weekly meeting to discuss a range of extra-curricular topics. For new boys at Eton, this can be one of the best ways of talking informally with a master and getting one’s bearings. As was the practice in several houses, John Faulkner himself played the role of Classical Tutor to the new boys in his house. This was in part to provide a forum in which to get to know the boys in his charge, something not always easily achieved in the hectic day-to-day life of running a house.

      When Cameron arrived at Faulkner’s house in late 1979, he once again had the implicit protection of his brother Alex, three years above him. A friend describes the older Cameron as a ‘glamorous, popular and arty’ presence at the school, which would have gone some way towards smoothing the younger boy’s path. In his first terms Cameron was ‘precocious and naturally self-confident and clearly enjoyed having a popular and well-known brother in the school’, says a friend. Alex’s presence would have offered a sense of belonging to the ‘new bug’. This protection was not without its downside, though. David was intensely aware of the swathe his elder brother had cut through the school, something which might have cast a pall on a less assured sibling. Nonetheless the extent to which David and Alex might ‘by being in the same house, tread on one another’s toes’, as one family member puts it, was a slight concern. Cameron himself has said he worried that he might never escape his brother’s shadow. Cameron was spared ‘fagging’. By the time of his arrival the practice of serving older boys had been all but phased out. Only the vestigial obligation for younger pupils to deliver the occasional message for their older housemates remained.

      Alex might have afforded protection but he had also set an academic standard that David could not at first match. Cameron minor, although described by some close to him as having a good brain, scarcely set the school on fire academically. New boys go into F year, and for each subject are graded, with the brightest boys going into F1 and the least promising into, say, F7. For most subjects Cameron was around halfway down his year. At that stage, he hardly made an impression on his French teacher, Tom Lyttelton (‘he wasn’t at the top of the class and wasn’t at the bottom’), although their paths were to cross higher up the school. Bob Baird, who taught Cameron Maths in that first year, says that of all the boys he taught who went on to become famous, Cameron was the only one he couldn’t recall.

      By Lent term 1980, Cameron had in effect moved up slightly, having survived Trials, the end-of-term exams which determine progress in the next term and which arouse much fear in boys of lesser ability or lesser application. When Cameron moved into E block, in his second year, an English teacher, Jeff Branch, became his Classical Tutor in place of John Faulkner. Branch’s preference was for a smaller group, so Cameron joined just four other boys for the weekly sessions. The emphasis was on drawing out boys in artistic areas they might not have experienced elsewhere, to discuss issues of relevance to the school and the wider community. Branch remembers them as being ‘a pretty accomplished group, urbane and bright’, in which the articulate Cameron was well able to hold his own. ‘He showed a lively interest in literature, music and art, and was generally forthcoming and perky. I had few worries about him. He seemed to be heading for a place at a decent university. At that stage there was no special sign of an interest in politics’ (unlike, he says, an earlier pupil of his, Oliver Letwin).

      Academically, a boy’s first three years at the school required a level of proficiency in a wide range of subjects. Before he could embark on his A-levels he would be required to pass five O-levels, and this represented quite a hurdle for some. Although from his prep school days Cameron had been regarded as bright, that intelligence had been more evident in person than in his academic work. Around this time he told a friend of his concern that he might not make the grade.

      Notwithstanding the size of the school, in Cameron’s first term a quick familiarity would have been achieved among those he encountered. It might not have been apparent at the time, but many of these boys were to become friends for decades (quite a few he knew already, from Heatherdown and elsewhere). In F year in Faulkner’s house, for example, there were just nine other boys, at least half of whom can call themselves good friends of Cameron to this day. The names James Learmond, Simon Andreae, Roland Watson, Tom Goff and ‘Toppo’ Todhunter crop up throughout Cameron’s life, as does that of Pete Czernin, in the same house but the year above.

      In those early weeks, the sense of sharing an ordeal binds young boys together. They would exchange notes about Eton’s curious rituals, which parts of the town are out of bounds, the agony of starched collars and the impenetrability of Eton argot. These and other topics would be kicked around in a ‘mess’, a ritual of considerable seriousness – for the youngest at least – in which boys form groups of three or four and meet every afternoon in the room of one of them for comforting quantities of tea and toast.

      Friends who remember Cameron from that time say he adapted well to his new school. He was good company, placid, with a ready wit, invaluable for keeping bullies at bay – just as he had done at Heatherdown. He had made the step up from being a big fish at his prep school to being a minnow at Eton with no obvious difficulty, reticence or homesickness. One master recalls: ‘He wasn’t a shy or retiring person, even in F, just a pleasant personality, a very natural, basically happy person.’ Another new boy, pointing out how everyone treads on eggshells in their first term, remembers Cameron coming up to him and asking ‘What’s your name?’ The boy nervously gave his surname, to which Cameron replied, ‘No, I mean your Christian name. I’m David.’ ‘He was just being friendly. It struck me as being incredibly personable and human and level headed of him,’ says the boy in question. ‘He clearly wasn’t fazed by the place at all.’

      But, with the onset of adolescence, some began to find his natural buoyancy verging on the bumptious. Someone who met him one school holiday around that time said he was ‘a typical Etonian, rather full of himself, and nothing like as funny as he thought himself’. The mother of an associate of his reports that she was told by the rather over-assured young man that ‘women have the intellectual span of a gnat’. By his early teens, he was inclined to have the odd furtive cigarette with his friends, and they would nip behind the cricket pavilion for an excited swig of beer or wine. He told friends then that he preferred to be called Dave, presumably because it sounded cooler. Although an early girlfriend, Caroline Graham, now the Mail on Sunday’s Los Angeles correspondent, says he was shy, she remembers Cameron as an ‘expert kisser’ at the age of thirteen. Cameron has no recollection of this, and wonders if she was thinking of his brother.

      He showed artistic leanings in his early years at Eton, and spent a good deal of time at the Art Schools. The master in charge was John Booth, described by a widely experienced figure at the school as ‘unquestionably the finest art teacher I’ve dealt with in my career’. Cameron had some etchings displayed at the school’s open day, the Fourth of June. He dabbled a bit in painting, and allowed his foot to be made into a plaster cast, for the art show of his talented sculptor friend Crispin Gibbs (with the toe as a spout), but – while studying for around five hours a week – principally enjoyed the relaxed ambience of creativity and exchange of ideas that Booth encouraged. ‘It was СКАЧАТЬ