For the Record. David Cameron

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СКАЧАТЬ at our carol service – Isaiah, I think – and Her Majesty was in the front row. I did OK, but crucially forgot to say ‘Thanks be to God’ at the end. I remembered as I stepped away from the lectern, started to turn back, then realised it was too late to go back, panicked, and said, ‘Oh shit.’

      When I mentioned this to Her Majesty forty years later, she laughed, but fortunately said she had absolutely no recollection of the incident.

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       Eton, Oxford … and the Soviet Union

      And then came Eton.

      Eton and freedom. This may seem odd when you consider that you are away from home, dressed in a tailcoat, looking like a penguin, and punished severely for any wrongdoing. But when you arrive, the feeling – of having your own room, being allowed to walk around the small town from class to class, cooking your own tea and using your large amounts of free time as you choose – is enormously refreshing.

      Another surprising thing about Eton is the extent to which you are able to find your own way. The teaching is first-class, and there is strong academic pressure to be a success in the classroom, and powerful social pressure to be a success on the playing field. But it is – or at least it was – a school that genuinely lets you, indeed encourages you to, forge your own path. The arts school, design studios, music facilities: they are all there for you. For someone like me – a jack of all trades – it suited me perfectly. I loved the place. I made friends. I was happy.

      But it was far from all plain sailing. Trouble started brewing for me in my third year due to my growing sense of being slightly mediocre, a mild obsession about being trapped in my big brother’s shadow, and a weakness for going with the crowd, even when the crowd was heading in the wrong direction. These things, combined with the temptations of drinking, smoking and thrill-seeking, nearly led to me being thrown out of school altogether.

In my political career I answered questions about drug use in my earlier life by saying ‘Everyone is entitled to a private past,’ and leaving it at that. But what happened did have a material effect on my career: not so much later, but when I was sixteen. A few friends had started getting hold of cannabis. In those days it was mostly in the form of hash, typically dark brown and crumbly, although occasionally some ‘Red Leb’, supposedly from the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, would show up. Instead of popping behind the school theatre for a fag, we started going for a joint.

      In my case – comically, as I now look back on it – three of us used to hire one of the school’s double scull rowing boats and head off to a small island in the middle of the Thames called Queen’s Eyot. Being quite small back then, I was the cox. Once there, we would roll up and spend a summer’s afternoon gently off our heads.

      This all came crashing down when the ‘ringleaders’ and so-called ‘dealers’ – the boys who had brought the drugs into the school – were caught and expelled. My two rowing friends were the first out of the door. I am not naming them now, not least because they’ve endured repeated approaches and entreaties from journalists to spill the beans on me. They never have.

      I was one of the last to be rounded up. Boy after boy had been interrogated. It was getting close to half-term. As a minor offender, maybe I had got away with it? Not a bit of it.

      I can still remember where I was sitting – in Jo Bradley’s maths class – when the door opened and I was summoned to see my housemaster, John Faulkner, in the middle of the day. This was without doubt the worst moment of my life so far. The housemaster gave me no chance for weak excuses: ‘It’s no use denying it, David, we have signed confessions from others, and we know about at least one occasion when you took drugs.’ The next stage was going to see the headmaster, Eric Anderson.

      Eric is a wonderful man who has the probably unique distinction of having taught two prime ministers – Tony Blair at Fettes and me at Eton – and an heir to the throne – Prince Charles at Gordonstoun. He now lives in my old constituency, and we sometimes bump into each other in Chipping Norton or in his village of Kingham, where he lives opposite a pub I am particularly fond of.

      The strange thing about that interview was that he seemed more ner­vous than me. I think he found the whole episode shocking, and he was clearly still coming to terms with the words for various drug paraphernalia. Because I was so keen not to implicate anyone else, I claimed – totally falsely – that I had only smoked cannabis once at Eton, and all the other times were ‘at home in the village’. This involved me telling a more and more elaborate set of lies. I am not sure he believed a word I said, but my abiding memory is the moment he asked, ‘Yes, Cameron, but who rolled the joint?’

The short-term consequences of my crime were tiresome, but I was so relieved at not being expelled that I would have been happy to accept any punishment. In the event I was ‘gated’ (restricted to within the school grounds), fined £20 for the smoking element, and made to write out one of Virgil’s Georgics on the morning of the school’s open day, 4 June. This involved copying out line after line of – as far as I was concerned – untranslatable Latin verse

      The real punishment was telling my parents. During the course of the 4 June celebrations, which I joined late after having completed my Georgic, Mum could hardly look at me, while Dad simply said, in a rather British way, that it would not be mentioned that day, but he would have a serious talk to me in the morning. When morning came he was nursing a hangover, and made rather a mess of it all.

      The long-term consequences of my drugs bust, however, were wholly beneficial. This was the shock I needed. First, I knew that one more misdemeanour would mean curtains for my time at Eton. Next, I realised that I needed to stop moping about lagging behind my brother and make my own way. Crucially, instead of drifting academically I needed to make a greater effort. It was time to pull my finger out.

      My O-level results were, for Eton, distinctly mediocre. But as soon as I got going in the lower sixth year – ‘B block’ at Eton – I was a student transformed. I loved my subjects (history, economics and history of art), I adored my teachers, and my results started to improve rapidly.

      Great teachers are the secret to any great school, and Eton is particularly blessed. The reason for singling a few out is that they so inspired me – including when it came to politics – that they really changed my life.

      Michael Kidson, a wood-block-throwing eccentric, was a superb history teacher who rejected all forms of Marxist determinism and unashamedly taught the ‘great men’ version of history. He brought the nineteenth century alive. Brilliant but biased, he thought Disraeli was an utter charlatan and all politicians after the fall of Lloyd George, with the exception of Churchill, pygmies. His love for Gladstone was such that when he read the account of the grand old man’s death in Philip Magnus’s biography, tears streamed down his cheeks.

But while history was a subject I loved, and history of art the one from which I remember most, it was economics and politics that really set me alight. Here was something that was relevant, exciting, intellectually stimulating, and really seemed to matter. Instead of learning about past problems, you could learn the tools to solve new ones. And this was the era of mass unemployment, high inflation and persistent British economic underperformance. More than almost anything, studying what has wrongly been called the dismal science put me on the path to a life in politics.

      To me at least, right from the start it was the radical monetarists and free marketeers who seemed to have the new and exciting ideas. There was a radical Institute of Economic Affairs pamphlet we were encouraged to read, ‘What Price Unemployment?’, which rejected all the old ideas about pumping more government spending into the economy СКАЧАТЬ