‘He is the most un-neurotic person I’ve ever met,” says Conservative Party chief executive Andrew Feldman, who has been close to Tory leader David Cameron since university. “He’s calm under pressure, extremely tough and straightforward.”
Britons are familiar with politicians with unstable characters hidden behind unshakeable beliefs. Labour’s Gordon Brown is accused of being one, as was Tony Blair. But Cameron emerges from every account as solid. Everyone describes his confidence, humour, quick thinking and tolerance.
But press them to flesh out the Cameron agenda — why he wants power — and they falter. It is that apparent void that puzzles voters and his own party. He is a rooted pragmatist. His opinions are drawn from rolling judgments about what he thinks is right and wrong, rather than from an ideology.
Being unfazed is not the same as knowing what to do. Ability, confidence — even arrogance — are likely to carry Cameron to Number 10 Downing Street. But beyond?
Voters sense fakery — more spin than substance, pollsters persistently report. Cameron’s circle knows that is how he is seen, hate it, but don’t know how to respond.
The problem is that Cameron has never convincingly explained to an electorate stung by the parliamentary expenses scandal and economic crisis why he wants to lead Britain.
“He isn’t gripped by a sense of mission,” says a member of the so-called “Notting Hill set”, named after the London neighbourhood that is home to many of his colleagues. “He’s not a man with a plan; but he’s surrounded himself with men who do have plans. In different circumstances he could be happy with totally different plans.”
Cameron has campaigned on the need for a “big society”, a phrase that baffles his party, but is on one level an expression of long-standing Tory values. Everyone close calls him a “One Nation Conservative”, like Harold Macmillan. One friend says he is “almost Victorian”, in that he is powered by a sense of duty and responsibility.
He is tolerantly pragmatic, rather than liberal — accepting the idea of gay adoption, for instance, while, if pushed, admitting to feeling that parenting is best done by a man and a woman. “He’s a very simple bloke,” says one friend. “Bright, he knows what he thinks, but people searching for some deep dark night of the soul aren’t going to find it — He’s what he appears to be; he doesn’t have doubts about many things. He’s a generous-spirited optimist.”
But optimism can appear shallow and Tories who wanted a tougher campaign are in despair. One of his circle responds: “I prefer phlegmatic and proportionate leadership — sensible and very English.”
At a cricket match between the Conservative and Labour parties in 2001 in his Oxfordshire constituency, at the high noon of New Labour, he and friends seemed to ape Tony Blair. “They saw how the metropolitan elite had taken over Labour,” said one Blair supporter. “They realised if they played things well they could take over the Tories in the same way. They didn’t see the Tory reinvention as an ideological project.”
He came into the party just as Margaret Thatcher’s star was diving and reputedly joined the Conservative research department after failing to land a job as a banker. At Oxford he was more than just another posh Old Etonian. “He was very funny, with an easy charm, which transcended his background. He had extraordinary self-confidence combined with a common touch,” says Feldman.
Already, the Cameron of today was largely in place. “Leadership in a man of 43 looks like cockiness in a boy of 22,” says one colleague. “He was full of himself.”
And, as ever, he did not burden himself with ideological baggage. “I don’t remember times when he espoused an unpopular cause or stood out against something that was wrong.”
Briefing the prime minister for question time in his 20s, he was soon special adviser first to Norman Lamont at the treasury and then Michael Howard at the home office. Former bosses remember him for his ability more than his beliefs, a willing dogsbody “ready to roll up his sleeves”.
He was caught on camera behind a shaken Lamont in September 1992 as he announced Britain had been forced to leave the European exchange rate mechanism. For Cameron, says Lamont, “Black Wednesday” was “a sobering lesson in how unpredictable and dangerous politics can be. That’s valuable when you’ve zoomed to the top.”
In the aftermath Cameron joined Carlton Television, promoting the company’s confrontational boss Michael Green. That chapter is widely seen as Cameron at his worst: pushy and manipulative.
Meanwhile, the Notting Hill set was flourishing. “He and his wife Sam were at the heart of it,” said one friend. “They had significantly more cash than others in our generation. It allowed them to rise a few notches higher.”
How grand the couple are is a matter of opinion. Cameron’s friends see him as upper-middle class and his wife as upper class, and neither notably wealthy by the standards of those elites. “He leads the life of a university-educated fortysomething”. But his Etonian background and aristocratic connections put him high on the social and economic scale.
Cameron believes Britain is broken by repute, not by the experience of living in a broken community. Most people are not invited to join the London gentlemen’s club, White’s, or to hunt, as he did growing up. He is an outstanding shot. Deer stalking, like hunting in Scotland, is a hobby that political exposure has forced him to put on hold.
Cameron, says a friend, “is maniacally gregarious. He and Sam have people permanently to lunch or dinner or to stay the weekend. We will be exactly as we are, they believe, and you will think we are great.
“I suspect he doesn’t like being alone. He’s not given to pondering himself and his lot.”
The couple’s friends are long established: “He commands enormous personal loyalty,” says Feldman. There is a gaudy north Oxfordshire set, including the Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson — a real Cameron friend — and Rebekah Brooks, the News International chief executive who talked Rupert Murdoch round to Cameron’s cause.
But the Camerons are also seen as “lushing up people who will be influential. They’ll have people to lunch only because he wants to be prime minister.”
“Cameron always looks over your shoulder at his smart friends. He’s dreadful with small people and thinks most of the world is small,” says one disgruntled Tory frontbencher.
Cameron’s allies say his team is heterogeneous: not everyone has been mates since Eton. Spin-doctor Andy Coulson, for example, did not go to university. “He doesn’t want a team of carbon copies. It’s open to people with ideas.”
Some who know him talk of a certain detachment, even with really good friends, and sangfroid. Cameron waited against all advice until this year before asking the controversial party donor Lord Ashcroft to reveal his tax status — a mistake, he now says. Also telling was his blunt reaction to his Ulster Unionist allies’ near-derailing of devolution as “a squeaky bum moment”.
“I’m an instinctive libertarian who abhors state prohibitions and tends to be sceptical of most government action,” Cameron wrote in a diary for the Guardian newspaper. “Raise any issue and I can predict Cameron’s thought processes,” says a friend. “Will it work? What will it cost? Should government be doing it at all?”
From that flows his Euroscepticism. He isn’t obsessive and doesn’t intend a Tory government to be shaped by the issue. His European policy will attempt to build relations with leaders, not institutions, and he has worked hard to win their affection.
Withdrawal from the European People’s Party — an alliance with right-wing extremists in Europe that Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg last week called the “nutters” — set that back, though Cameron bristles when his allies are described as homophobic and antisemitic.
“He’s not a neoconservative,” says one shadow cabinet member. “He has a classic 18th-century suspicion of foreign entanglements.” His claim to have backed the Iraq war reluctantly is supported by articles written for the Guardian at the time: “[I] have distinctly dovish tendencies.” He wrote he would vote for war “grudgingly, unhappily, unenthusiastically”.
Cameron, says one of his team, wants to be a domestic prime minister. He “comes alive when he talks about social issues”. “He has a passion for self-confident ‘get government off my back’ public servants — good school principals, army officers, social entrepreneurs.”
Education is Cameron’s chosen testing ground: it was the job he picked when Michael Howard offered him any shadow cabinet post. “He cares about economic policy and sees it as the key to the social reform he also wants to achieve,” says Feldman — nobody suggests it is his primary interest — though one colleague adds, “he totally gets numbers, he worked at the treasury, he can more than hold his own”.
“The phrase that totally captures Dave,” says one colleague, “is ‘quietly effective’.” The Cameron camp insists he is contemptuous of the showmanship of opposition.
Rhetoric falls awkwardly from his lips. Colleagues describe someone who refers constantly to his constituency for examples of government ineffectiveness, who wants parliamentary reform of a traditional sort and who is “at his most impressive chairing policy meetings”. His favourite criticism, they claim, is “that’s a bit of a gimmick”. —