Cameron: Practically a Conservative. Elliott Francis Perry

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СКАЧАТЬ they are also allowed more weekends away from the school. By this time Cameron’s brother had gone on to Bristol University, but he would go back to Peasemore, often seeing his sisters Tania – then heading for A-levels at St Mary’s, Calne, in Berkshire – and Clare – who was still at the Manor prep school in Abingdon – as well as his parents. Cameron, as he says himself, didn’t really ‘get going academically’ until he started doing A-levels. He was now beyond the reach of those set subjects required by the Eton curriculum and he could follow his own interests more closely. He chose as his three A-levels History of Art, History and Economics with Politics. It is at this stage, perhaps, that the benefits of Eton come to the fore. Cameron was fortunate to be taught History of Art by William Franklin, undoubtedly one of the school’s stars, and Bill Winter, the convivial organiser of the Political Society. He was taught History by Giles St Aubyn and Michael Kidson, a kindly and scholarly man, whose faux pomposity endeared him to generations of Etonians. But it was his enthusiasm for Economics (and Politics) that really fed his academic appetite.

      As a specialist, a boy is free to choose the Tutor who will see him through to A-levels, with whom he would share twice-weekly informal private business sessions. As before, these sessions, often just ‘talking things through’, as one master puts it, were not oriented towards exams but were designed to give boys a taste for off-curriculum culture at its broadest. John Clark, who taught Cameron for his last four terms, sees private business as one of the keys to what might be called ‘the Eton experience’. ‘The school is remarkably informal,’ he says, ‘despite the exterior that the outside world sees. It gives tremendous opportunities to talk and discuss and be taken seriously by adults, and private business is a case in point.’

      Cameron chose as his Tutor Tim Young, an Etonian himself, who ran the school’s First XI soccer team. Paradoxically, although Young himself had been a scholar (remarkably, the fourth in what is now a family line of five to win a King’s scholarship), his reputation among the boys was as much for gregariousness as for academic excellence. ‘Tim Young is very nice,’ says one gifted contemporary. ‘It shows Cameron wasn’t at that stage very academically ambitious. Of all the choices you make at that age, it’s one of the more revealing ones about who you are. I imagine he chose him as much because he was a good bloke as anything else.’

      Yet Tim Young remembers Cameron on the launchpad: ‘What I saw was the start of a developing of the considerable academic motor that took him on to Oxford. Physically and mentally he took off in the sixth form. He was beginning to discover that he had a potential which people had never identified.’ John Clark agrees: ‘He was very much a late developer academically, one who came good once he did a series of subjects that suited him. He didn’t make a great splash at Eton, but of all the people I taught he was one of the most impressive. What is striking is that his subject choices, History, History of Art and Economics, might have been thought as relatively light by some universities. But they didn’t stop him doing very well.’

      In the spring of 1983, two masters took a party of twenty-six boys to Rome to help them with their Art History studies. When such a group is let loose on a foreign jaunt, good behaviour is not a priority. For much of the trip, while most of the boys saw the sights, David Cameron was immobile, having sprained his ankle dancing overenthusiastic reels to the bagpipe-playing of his friend Ben Weatherall. ‘[He] was busking at the top of the Spanish Steps,’ Cameron explained, ‘trying to raise some money so we could go and have a drink. I got slightly exuberant and turned my ankle over.’ Cameron thought the leg was fine, so his friends left him. It turned out it was quite badly twisted and he had to crawl all the way down the Spanish Steps on his hands and knees. As a result he had to miss a good many of the sights, but as a contemporary at the time said euphemistically, he ‘made up for it well in other departments’. Quite what this means must remain a mystery, although, as one of Cameron’s close friends remarked, Dave, while no prude, was always ‘measured’.

      For the first time in his life, he was enjoying real academic achievement. In the summer of 1983, at the end of the first year of his A-level course, he won the Trials Prize for Politics, which gave him a distinction, an excellent augury for the following summer. The following term, at the start of his second A-level year, his Option was the Spanish Civil War, drawing largely on Hugh Thomas’s celebrated history of the conflict, taught by Edward Wilson Smith. For his work on that topic he won another award, though this was a marginally less impressive achievement – there was only one other candidate in his year.

      Sustaining his interest in politics, in the following (Lent) term he chose a subject taught by Dr Andrew Gailey, who was later to be housemaster to Princes William and Harry. The area he chose was ‘Northern Ireland: A Study in Conflict’, which suggests an awakening interest in the Conservative and Unionist Party. Gailey, himself from Northern Ireland, took the boys through issues such as how the state deals with terrorism, why there are great literary outpourings at times of stress and so on. It was a more serious and demanding course than many boys chose. Although little homework accompanied the course, Gailey said, ‘it never struck me that he was someone who went for the soft option’.

      Gailey got to know Cameron well, becoming his Tutor for the second of his two years as a specialist when Tim Young took a sabbatical. He also taught him History of Art, during which Cameron had to choose a topic for a dissertation as part of his A-level course work. Gailey recalls his wife, an art historian, inviting Cameron to hold his arms out straight in front of him and piling ever more books on top of them. ‘I remember thinking, “Has he got time to read all this?”’ says Gailey. But, suddenly, he got to grips with it. As has happened many times since, he summed up what was required and did the necessary. ‘He just took the books, worked out his brief, wrote a very good thesis and got a decent mark. It was an impressive piece of work. He has the front of being quite jovial, laid-back, not very serious in a way, but if you told him, “You’ve got to get this done,” he could turn it on. I was quite surprised at his capacity to devour books.’

      Eton and the Conservative Party go together. This was more true than ever in the early 1980s. Thatcherism was getting into its stride and with the Falklands reconquered and Michael Foot’s Labour Party humiliated at the polls, to back anyone but the Tories was to back the losers. But there were dissenters. James Wood, now a well-known literary critic and a contemporary of Cameron at Eton, was editor of the school magazine. He challenged the right-wing orthodoxy and wrote a philippic against Thatcherism which caused a fuss in the national press. Ian Cameron, having read about it in the Express, called David to lament the fact that the school was now evidently full of ‘Reds’, a complaint Cameron teasingly passed on to Wood (whose nickname, incidentally, was ‘Red’ Wood). Wood, though, says now, ‘I don’t recall [Cameron] being involved in any political activity at Eton.’

      Had Cameron in fact decided on a career in politics from an early age? He has claimed that he hadn’t. In defending himself against the charge of having had a wild time at Oxford, he told the BBC that he didn’t know at the time that he was going to be a politician. He chose Augustus Pugin for his History of Art dissertation topic. But it was Pugin’s work on Chirk Castle, Wales (to which, handily, Cameron had access, through a relation) that was the subject of the dissertation, not the architect’s more famous decorations at the Houses of Parliament. John Clark says, ‘I’m pretty sure I viewed him as politically ambitious even then. He was articulate and politically motivated and interested. He was interested in the business of politics, in politics as a profession, even at that stage. I don’t think he’d planned it out in the way [Michael] Heseltine is supposed to have done. He found politics stimulating, in a good pragmatic Conservative way. He was intrigued by politics as an art, as a way of resolving problems.’

      One acquaintance, asked when Cameron decided on politics as a career, faltered before answering and went off the record: ‘He decided at Eton, I think, that politics was the career for him.’ Another Eton contemporary says that he didn’t know Cameron well at school, but that he was referred to by a mutual acquaintance as ‘the guy who wants to be Prime Minister’. Another friend recalls Cameron, СКАЧАТЬ