Cameron: Practically a Conservative

Yet there was always a keenness not to disappoint. Those close to the family remember few occasions when either parent was moved to anger. Both of them exerted an implicit but benign authority, an enviable degree of control, which meant that the children always knew where they stood. If standards had not been met, a quiet ‘I see’ and a knowing glance would be sufficient. Indeed, this seems to have been enough to instil a strong desire to succeed, to win parental approval. ‘In some homes, where there are bright children, they can get the better of the father, but Ian was definitely the boss – he ruled the roost,’ says a friend. It was, says Susan Rathbone, the widow of David Cameron’s godfather, ‘quite a tight household…you wouldn’t get away with just lounging on the sofa. No beer cans on the carpet. It was a lovely, comfortable, delicious home, but there was no slacking.’

This was true of school reports too, when the formality of the process alone would imply a certain seriousness. The children would be called in to see their father, who would read out the report before they had a chance to see it. Disapproval did not have to be obvious to be effective. It was clearly spelt out, though, on at least one occasion when, a family friend remembers, Ian had been informed of a misdemeanour at Eton. David Cameron was firmly told that his father was not paying the hefty school fees in order for him to break school rules.

While all families go through friction and periods of stress – and the Camerons have had their share of crosses to bear – their friends speak uniformly of their readiness to support one another. Neither parent can be said to be dominant, and David Cameron appeared to be equally respectful towards both. Ian and Mary Cameron ‘have a good, healthy relationship, thoroughly solid and practical’, says Susan Rathbone. ‘It’s a great image of marriage he has grown up with. They’re just very good at dealing with life.’ A former girlfriend of David agrees: ‘His parents are very cool, settled in themselves, very calm and sure of themselves. There are no psychological issues there. There’s something very wholesome, but not in a boring way.’ For Giles Andreae, whose mother had been a debutante with the young Mary Mount and who is one of David’s lifelong friends, there is something almost intimidating about the Camerons’ partnership: ‘That couple, they’re both so self-assured and magnanimous. They have so many friends. It’s almost quite scary if you’re not very confident yourself.’

While the parents wanted their children to be aware of how privileged they were, it must have been difficult for a playful, popular little boy to imagine how different ‘real life’ was for the majority of the population. In this Eden of cricket matches and gambolling through fields, it would have been understandable if the Cameron children had taken it for granted that the world is a pretty happy place. ‘It is a very natural age,’ says Giles Andreae, now a writer of children’s books. ‘Obviously you are aware that some people have big houses and some people have small houses, and that not everyone spends their time swimming and playing tennis. Privilege in itself is not a bad thing, it is how you deal with it that matters.’

The house of David Cameron’s childhood is now owned by his elder brother Alex, who lives there with his wife and children. Gwen Hoare, for whom the family built a flat in the Old Rectory’s stables (she had her eighty-sixth birthday in February 2007), is thus seeing a third generation of the family grow up. Ian and Mary Cameron live in a smaller house abutting its grounds. Both remain a strong influence on their now famous son. ‘Mary is one of the most compassionate people I know,’ says Susan Rathbone. ‘She’s level headed, not remotely impressed by froth and completely no nonsense.’

In the early 1990s Ian Cameron had to have one of his legs amputated and replaced by a prosthetic one, and in early 2006 he had the other one amputated, but as ever he minimised the inconvenience. In the latter year, he got an infection in one eye following an operation and lost the use of it. With two prosthetic legs and a walking stick, friends say admiringly, Ian would now, just, and with some reluctance, own up to being ‘disabled’. Giles Andreae says, ‘Ian is one of the most confident and self-assured people I have ever met. I don’t remember his disability ever being an issue. It wasn’t that it was not discussed out of good manners, it just wasn’t an issue. He’s a breezy, sociable, outgoing, affable man. Those are the qualities that would have had more effect on David.’ Yet the influence of Ian’s disability was enormous, if unstated. For a start, the children had a constant reminder that the petty everyday complaints of childhood were minor indeed. ‘Whingeing wasn’t on the menu,’ says one family member. It may be that Ian Cameron, while seeking to impart certain values, was anxious to protect his sons from the pressures – emotional and financial – that he had felt when growing up. ‘[David’s] parents were fantastic,’ says Pete Czernin, an Eton friend. ‘They were never pushy with their children; they gave them all implicit confidence without cockiness.’

Yet, for all the lack of witting parental pressure to succeed, Ian’s unstated determination made him a hard man to live up to. Without wishing it, he set a high bar. Susan Rathbone agrees that, tacitly, a standard was set. There may be, she says, ‘a subconscious drive that Dave has got from Ian’s incredible example. Ian has vast enthusiasm – which Dave has inherited – and a sort of unstoppableness which I’m sure is very inspirational to live with.’ When he was thirteen, Cameron is said to have told a friend: ‘He is my role model. Dad has never let his disability hold him back. He has proved you can do anything you want in life.’

HEATHERDOWN Prep school 1974–1979

At the age of seven David Cameron was sent to Heatherdown Preparatory School near Ascot in Berkshire. With just under a hundred pupils, Heatherdown was small but smart, with one former master claiming that it was ‘the most select school in the country’.

Its business was to take impressionable young boys from comfortably-off families and unapologetically mould them into little gentlemen of the old school. Prince Andrew and Prince Edward were both educated at Heatherdown. Their cousin Marina Mowatt has said: ‘I’ll never forget the smell of the place – pencil sharpenings, sausages and boys.’ David Cameron’s manners, confidence and sense of duty were all enhanced at Heatherdown. It may also have helped develop his mental and emotional resilience, and it certainly fixed him in the highest social milieu.

Today very few children are sent to boarding school so young, and thirty-three years ago it was beginning to fall out of fashion even among the rich. (Heatherdown itself closed while Cameron was still at Eton.) He says that it was an ‘absurdly young’ age to be required to leave home. It was some comfort to him that his elder brother Alex was already a pupil. And, like generations of other prep school boarders before him, Cameron seems to have adjusted to his new life, helped in his first few weeks by being just one of a group of seven-year-old boys a long way from home. He spent his first term in a pleasant adjunct to the main school called Heatherlea, where the boys could be gently acclimatised to life in a boarding school. ‘We were mollycoddled a good deal at Heatherlea,’ says an old boy. ‘Mostly what I remember is the endless pillow-fights and non-stop ragging in the dorm.’ After a term or two at Heatherlea, boys were confronted with a more forbidding and traditional dormitory of about a dozen boys in the main school. On arrival, new occupants were allowed to bring their own rug – to cover the Spartan wooden floorboards – and their own teddy.

As he progressed Cameron’s school day was bookended by God. Before breakfast every day, senior boys would gather for ‘scripture’ in the school library. Here the headmaster, James Edwards, would ruminate on a text from the Bible (‘The Sadducees didn’t believe in Jesus, so they were sad, you see’ was one of his lines). After cereal and a cooked breakfast, boys would meet for a ten-minute chapel service before the curriculum classes began. The education was determinedly traditional. Even by the mid-1970s, Heatherdown saw little advantage in following what it would have seen as fashionable new methods. The teachers themselves were mostly products of English public schools and the war. The much respected Maths and Geography teacher, Monty Withers, had been at Harrow, the Science teacher, Frank Wilson, had been at Sedbergh, the headmaster was a Radleian and Christopher Bromley-Martin, the French master, an Old Etonian. These were the core staff around whom the school revolved, and to whom a succession of younger, short-staying visiting teachers (some very young and ill-qualified) deferred, to varying degrees. What had served that senior echelon well would do the trick for the new generation.

The school’s head was a remote, forbidding figure who, with his wife Barbara (‘Bar’), a devoted gardener, ran a conservative regime. Edwards would insist – at an early stage – that boys learn to recite the Kings and Queens of England and their dates on the throne. The same went for the names of all the books of the Old and New Testament. R. V. Watson’s La Langue des français and Ritchie’s First Steps in Latin were considered unimprovable introductions to their subjects, and there was little truck with ‘the new Latin’ or ‘the new Maths’, which other comparable schools were beginning to investigate. After lunch (liver on Thursdays, fish on Fridays) boys were expected to rest on their bed with a book, a break rich with opportunities for insubordination and mischief, followed by games – cricket in the summer, soccer from September and rugby in the Lent term. Tea, as might be expected in so resoundingly comfortable an institution, was a meal of some importance. Boys would take it in turns to sit next to matron, who would wearily insist on faultless table manners.

The academic day ended as it had begun with another ten-minute chapel service, except on Sundays when the service was rather longer. The last meal, a light supper, could be light indeed. On Thursdays it consisted of a single brick of Weetabix. At one point a looming revolt by parents was bought off by the introduction of chocolate and biscuits to fill the gap between the early supper and bedtime. Nevertheless, David Cameron, who admits that he was ‘rather tubby’ as a boy, says he ‘lost a stone every term because the helpings were so small’.

He seems otherwise to have been happy, however. His easy affability, which has since helped smooth his path, was early in evidence. A contemporary remembers him as ‘bright, bushy-tailed and good fun. He had a good ability to get on with people.’ ‘My memory is of someone who was always smiling, very social and chatty,’ says Rhidian Llewellyn, who, as an eighteen-year-old doing his gap year, taught Cameron briefly (having been a boy at Heatherdown himself) and went on to teach at Arnold House, the Dragon and Papplewick. ‘Both he and Alex had a lot of charm, although David was the noisier of the two. He was quick-witted, full of jokes, a natural boarding school boy. They were terribly easy to get on with, and I imagine very easy for their parents to bring up. He was a bright boy, but at the time no brighter than many of his contemporaries. Among all those titled children, Cameron was one of the most normal. He was just a middle-class boy from a nice family.’

‘The parents all knew each other, of course,’ says Daniel Wiggin, a former pupil, and a good number of the boys saw one another during the school holidays for cricket games, for example. ‘It was quite smart,’ says Wiggin, ‘very much one of the grandest. The Kleinworts, the Hambros, the royals, the St Andrews. But they weren’t there to be smart. They were there because a lot of the fathers had been there themselves.’ When Prince Andrew was sent to Heatherdown, it was partly on the recommendation of Lord Porchester, the Queen’s racing manager, whose two sons had flourished there. Evidently satisfied, the Queen sent Edward there as well. David Cameron was two and a half years younger than Edward, but the prince and Alex Cameron were contemporaries and friends. The Queen could occasionally be seen driving a green station-wagon, dropping her sons off at the end of a weekend at home or at the beginning of term, sometimes stopping by for a cup of tea with the headmaster. More often, though, the royal presence was indicated by the series of low-key royal detectives.

‘I think it is fair to say that the headmaster used to choose according to the stable rather than the colt,’ says Llewellyn. ‘If you were of the right sort of background, it wouldn’t have been terribly difficult to get in. You didn’t have to be brilliantly clever. Certainly there was no formal exam. Its business was to get boys into Eton, which was via the Common Entrance exam.’ Among the eighty or so sets of parents of David’s contemporaries, there were eight honourables, four sirs, two captains, two doctors, two majors, two princesses, two marchionesses, one viscount, one brigadier, one commodore, one earl, one lord (unspecified) and one queen (the Queen). One former pupil, the son of a mere MP, said, with only some exaggeration, that the place was so full of titled people that he was one of the few boys there whose name didn’t change – as he inherited some title – during his time there. At the school’s annual sports day, two or three helicopters bearing smartly dressed parents would land on the playing fields. Instead of the customary signs for Ladies and Gents, Heatherdown had a third category: Ladies, Gentlemen and Chauffeurs. ‘It was deadly serious – the drivers were not supposed to mix with the other guests,’ says a former teacher.

The school attached great importance to good manners. One Wednesday in the mid-1970s, the headmaster James Edwards decided that standards were slipping, so after games, instead of giving the boys their customary free time, he stood in the middle of the rugby pitch and made the boys walk around doffing their caps to the corner flags and saying ‘Good afternoon, Sir.’ The importance attached to courtesy sprang from deeper values that the school was trying to instil. ‘It was about the ability to get on with people of all backgrounds. The notion of noblesse oblige was very strong, both for the school and David Cameron at home, I think,’ says Rhidian Llewellyn. Alexander Bathurst, who later became a consultant on leadership, agrees: ‘It was very much small-“c” conservative, with good principles – honesty, enthusiasm, upholding the honour of school, family and friends.’ Dan Wiggin says the school sought to cultivate ‘a sense of duty, Christian moral responsibility and awareness of people around you and how to behave properly’. The relative lack of academic pressure allowed the inculcation of such values to be something of a priority.

Nor was Edwards squeamish about the use of corporal punishment in fostering those values. Carrots, as well as sticks, were deployed. A boy who did a good deed or commendable work, or who behaved particularly nicely, would be given what was called an ‘Alpha’. If he won three Alphas, he was given a Plus and a reward. If, though, he misbehaved, he would get an ‘Omega’. Too many of those meant a certain beating – with a clothes brush on the trousers. This would be administered by Edwards, pipe clenched between his teeth. The punishment was followed by a manly handshake as if to wipe the slate clean. ‘It stung a bit,’ remembers Llewellyn, ‘but James Edwards wouldn’t have been unusual in that respect at the time.’ Some crimes carried a beating without question. One Cameron classmate, Rupert Stevenson, remembers that that was his punishment for talking in chapel.

But to speak to the school’s old boys is to gain the impression that they thrived on defying authority. There was no stigma, physical or otherwise, to being beaten – rather the opposite. Alexander Bathurst says that he and his contemporaries used to ‘see how many petty rules we could break. We weren’t supposed to read comics after lights out, for example, so you could be quite sure that is exactly what we would try to do. But it is still fair to say that you did rather live in awe of the senior masters and matrons.’ One former boy remembers that there was a regular opportunity for misbehaviour, charmingly mild though it was. Early on Sunday evenings, when only one teacher was on duty, boys would tune in to Radio 1 to listen to Alan Freeman’s Pick of the Pops, dancing on desks and chairs, playing air guitar. The Boomtown Rats’ ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’, which topped the UK singles chart in Cameron’s last term at Heatherdown, was a particular favourite.

Whereas over half a century earlier the actor David Niven had got into trouble with the Heatherdown head – in fact, he was expelled – for a misdemeanour with a marrow, the cause of David Cameron’s downfall was strawberries – or more particularly the strawberries grown by Bar Edwards. Determined groups of small boys, David Cameron prominent among them, repeatedly mounted midnight raids on her kitchen garden, with a view to devouring her produce back in the dorm. This classically jolly jape ensured hours of hilarity spiced with the fear of discovery. Deep into the night, formidable matrons with torches would patrol the sleeping quarters in the knowledge that those whose beds were empty would most likely be found whispering among the soft fruit. Cameron more than once felt the sting of the clothes brush.

Because it was a small school, all the pupils knew one another, giving an air of intimacy that some more soulless establishments of this type might have lacked. Former Heatherdown boys remember with fondness the woods and the lake. Here, dressed in distinctive green boiler-suits, pupils would make dens, arrange mock fights and generally play. In many respects, it seems to have been idyllic and carefree. ‘It was a very happy place, a great school,’ says Alexander Bathurst. ‘One or two might not have been well suited to it, but the majority would have certainly enjoyed it.’

Both Cameron boys played for the school’s cricket First XI, Alex with marginally greater accomplishment. David was a stylish, medium-pace bowler with a good eye. ‘He was the sort of person who just knew how to throw a ball,’ said a friend later of the way sports came easily to him. Cricket was his strongest team sport, with rugby his weak spot. ‘He didn’t have the physique of a great sportsman, but he didn’t hang back. He was quite a brave little boy; he wasn’t windy at all,’ recalls one who knew him well.

Rhidian Llewellyn was dutifully raking a long-jump sandpit on the school’s sports day in 1978 when he was approached by Mrs Gordon Getty. She was making plans for her son Peter (grandson of the oil billionaire John Paul Getty) to invite four classmates to the USA, and would he like to accompany the boys, by way of looking after them? As the young teacher was barely out of school himself and had never flown, he jumped at the opportunity. The trip turned out to be even more lavish than he can have dreamed. One of the lucky four friends of Getty was David Cameron, and such a dizzying glimpse of the high life may have contributed to his perception of wealth. Years later, answering claims that his was a life of privilege, he said he wasn’t rich because he didn’t ‘own a private jet and I have no friends with a private jet’.

At lunchtime on 21 July 1978, two days after the end of term, Getty, Cameron, Simon Andreae (brother of Giles), Peter Romilly and Fergus Wylie, accompanied by their eighteen-year-old minder Rhidian Llewellyn, boarded BOAC Flight 579 (Concorde, as it happened) at Heathrow to fly to Washington DC. As the excited boys tucked into their caviar, salmon and beef bordelaise, Llewellyn turned round to check that all was well and that his charges were more or less behaving themselves. He was met with the sight, a few rows behind, of David Cameron, eleven years old, cheerily raising a glass of Dom Pérignon ’69 and exclaiming ‘Good health, Sir!’ ‘Sir’, only seven years older than Cameron, was so disbelieving of his own good fortune that he felt it would be churlish to challenge Cameron’s cheek. This willingness to nudge jovially at the barriers of authority (rather than to throw stones at them, for example) comes from Ian Cameron, and generally seems to have been carried off disarmingly. ‘There were times when you needed to tell him to shut up,’ says Llewellyn. ‘Like any ten-year-old, he would get a bit out of line and need a bit of a metaphorical cuffing, but I was never irritated by him and often amused by him.’

Washington was going through a heatwave that summer, but no matter. For four days the excited boys from the UK were conveyed to all the capital’s most celebrated sights in an air-conditioned Lincoln Convertible. It also took them to a French restaurant where they enjoyed the spectacle of roller-skating waiters. From Washington they went on to a further three days of sight-seeing in New York, where they were based at the Hotel Pierre. The itinerary included the Empire State Building and the World Trade Center. They then flew on to Disneyworld in Florida, roller-coasters and all, and, to celebrate Peter Getty’s twelfth birthday, to the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. Next it was Las Vegas, where the temperatures reached 120ºF, which somewhat curtailed the sight-seeing, restricting them to hanging round the MGM Grand Hotel’s pool and investigating the hotel’s gaming devices. The tour was rounded off with three days at the Grand Canyon, including a helicopter flight, followed by a trip to Hollywood. They regained their bearings with a week based at Pacific Heights, the Getty home overlooking San Francisco’s Golden Gates and Alcatraz.

At Heatherdown there wasn’t a great push, as there is at many schools nowadays, to get children into a certain public school. It seemed part of the natural order of things that it would go on doggedly churning out boys who got into Eton (and less often Harrow), and it saw no reason to change. The only scholastic pressure that most boys felt came in the last year, when the exam was nearly upon them. But this began to change in the late 1970s. Eton started making greater demands of its pupils and upping its standards. Heatherdown was shaken when one or two boys started to fail the Common Entrance exam (often being taken away to a crammers to retake it, generally with success). David Cameron was fortunate that only at the end of his spell at the school was Common Entrance beginning to be a problem. In any event, he applied himself to the task with what has become his customary efficiency and in the summer of 1979, he was accepted at Eton.

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