Trying to work out what David Cameron really thinks, I had a strange sense of déjà vu
He is the longest serving of our major party leaders. He could be Prime Minister next year. He has had publicity that many a politician would kill for. Yet how many voters can answer a simple question — what does David Cameron really think?
That is what I have been trying to do for a documentary on BBC Radio 4. My producer Martin Rosenbaum and I have spoken to those who know Cameron best — his friends, his colleagues and a few of those who he’s crossed over the years. Eighteen months ago we made a programme which asked the same question about the man who then looked set to be the next occupant of 10 Downing Street, Gordon Brown. Our aim then and now was to examine the values and the influences upon the man who would be Prime Minister rather than their policies. We’ve been struck by how much harder our task has been this time around.
Brown had been at the top of government for ten years. Cameron has never held office. Brown had just had a vast compendium of his speeches published and, as a young man, had written a book outlining his political philosophy. Not so Cameron. The non-political influences on Brown — in particular, his father’s religious teaching and the impact of almost losing his sight — were already well documented. In comparison, much less is known about how Cameron’s background shaped him.
The influences on the Tory leader are, for many, summed up by just two photographs. The first shows a young Cameron strutting in tailcoats alongside fellow Old Etonian Boris Johnson, in a portrait of Oxford University’s answer to the Bash Street kids. Both are now bidding to prove that association with the braying boys of the Bullingdon Club is not a bar to high office. The second finds Cameron lurking in the shadows on Black Wednesday watching his boss Norman Lamont announce that he was giving up the costly struggle to keep the pound in the ERM.
Some Labour politicians dream of deploying these two politically toxic images to portray Cameron as a privileged young Tory toff who bears some responsibility for the economic humiliation of the Major years. Others fear that this strategy will be no more likely to succeed than Tory attacks on Tony Blair for his membership of CND. They recognise that, important though they are, those images tell only part of the Cameron story. They do not explain the long political journey he has taken. In 1996, the young candidate Cameron rallied his party conference with a call for a return to a tax-cutting agenda and to fight Labour’s plans to tame the ‘British lion’ and turn her into a ‘federalist pussycat’. A decade later Cameron, now as leader, was telling his party to embrace gay marriage, social justice and social responsibility.
There are three other images from the album of influences on David Cameron which help explain that journey. The first is of his wife, Samantha; the second is his severely disabled son, Ivan; the third is the face of defeat. Each contributed to converting him — albeit much later than many of his friends — to the idea of ‘modernising’ the Tory party.
Nicholas Boles, one of the earliest believers in the need for the Tories to change radically, credits Samantha Cameron with ‘dragging’ her husband ‘to see the world as she saw it’. Boles says she forced the Tory leader to understand that Section 28 (the ban on the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality in schools) was ‘an attempt to stigmatise a particular group’. The Tory party had treated Cameron so well, Boles argues, that it took Sam to make him understand other people’s hatred of it. A surprising role, perhaps, for the daughter of a baronet whose job is selling £950 handbags.
It was the birth of their severely disabled child, Ivan, which forced the Camerons to live their lives as many others live theirs — dependent on public services. Night after night spent sleeping on hospital floors changed the man who’d come from a ‘rarefied background’, says Ian Birrell, who met Cameron as deputy editor of the Independent, but befriended him as the fellow father of a very disabled child. The experience did more than make Cameron a ‘small c’ conservative when it comes to the funding of the NHS. It also filled him with frustration about its bureaucracy and fuelled his belief that the state needs to create the conditions in which voluntary organisations can thrive.
However, it took the Tory defeat of 2005 final ly to turn Cameron from archetypal Tory boy to arch Tory moderniser. Danny Finkelstein, the Times columnist, met Cameron when he was head of research at Conservative Central Office in Smith Square. They were part of a group of Tory modernisers who used to talk politics over pizzas. He says that labelling the Cameroons ‘the Notting Hill set’ misses the point. They are, he says, ‘the Smith Square set’ whose shared experience of defeat forged their politics and distinguishes them from the Tories who came before.
Opponents would, no doubt, add a fourth image of Cameron — the PR man. All these images may help explain the political journey Cameron has undertaken, but they cannot predict its eventual destination. And that is where friends of Cameron become rather hazy. Faced by choices about governing rather than political positioning, they cannot spell out what he would do.
Take just one example — Europe. It’s one thing to instruct your party to stop ‘obsessing’ about the issue. It’s quite another to decide whether to betray your activists who believe you are committed to renegotiating Britain’s relationship with the EU or to pick a long, lonely and, potentially, futile fight with the European leaders you’ve fought so hard to join.
Put this or other choices on tax or climate change or social justice or social responsibility to a member of Team Cameron and they soon reply, ‘Ah, but he is a pragmatist.’ In this sense he is not a moderniser but a traditionalist harking back to the days not just before Thatcher but before Heath and ‘Selsdon Man’. Douglas Hurd, Cameron’s predecessor as MP for Witney, says, with some proprietorial pride, that he is a young man who is learning on the job. Rest assured that between now and the next election Gordon Brown will work hard to flush out the answers that I failed to get.
While making this programme I’ve had an uneasy feeling of déjà vu. Fourteen years ago I struggled to pin down what another young opposition leader really thought. People said he didn’t believe very much at all. Pinning down Tony Blair proved so tricky in 1994 that Panorama scrapped its planned profile. It’s a mistake I vowed not to repeat.
Nick Robinson is the BBC’s political editor. What Does David Cameron Really Think? will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 this Saturday at 11 a.m. and then on the Radio 4 website.
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