It isn’t surprising that two things have happened since Cameron’s discovery. First, that many have doubted whether, in any real sense, he exists at all. And, second, that various competing and incompatible groups should be claiming that he most certainly does exist and that he is, emphatically, one of their own. So he is variously the heir to Clarkeism, he is the Mark III Eurosceptic, he is Thatcher’s grandson, he is Disraeli’s direct descendant.
But what does he say? Plenty, for Cameron is, in his own often repeated phrase, something of a “media tart”. Since becoming the MP for the semi-rural semi-paradise of Witney he has written regularly for his local newspaper, the Oxford Journal, for Guardian Unlimited, the online presence of the newspaper, and for various parish publications, as well as making many speeches. So it’s all there if, in the words of Stella Gibbons’s Mr Mybug, “ You cah to dig”.
His utterances show his passage from freshman MP to being a contender, it’s just that in his case the timescale is truncated. Just over two years ago, for example, we find him — courtesy of some of his more broad-minded constituents — worrying about the new Sexual Offences Bill.
“Flashing,” he writes, “is a disgusting activity which should be a crime . . . But my constituents, who happen to be naturists, pointed out — again, quite rightly — that the Bill had been badly drawn up and would criminalise the perfectly harmless activity of taking your clothes off on a beach or in a park that is specifically designed for that purpose.” As often happens with Cameron, you understand the sentiment, if not the detail. Which beach was “specifically designed” for naturism?
A few months later he is concerned about horses being shipped abroad to make food for foreigners, and he links it to what he calls the chaos of our immigration system. “It’s odd,” he writes, “that while the Government has lost all control of who comes into Britain, they are considering allowing horses out of Britain — to be eaten on the Continent.” Surely one of the least odd political phenomena ever to be observed.
Country concerns loom large for the early Cameron, making his blood boil and causing him to barrack anti-hunting MPs in the chamber (a lapse which, with characteristic good grace, he laments), but they fade rapidly away after the passage of the anti-hunting legislation. One of his political virtues, it seems, is not to chase after lost causes. His blood is self-cooling.
His style also evolves. Sixteen months ago it was, “Whoops, reshuffled again”. Some weeks and an unremarked re-reshuffle later, it was: “This week I started a new job. Michael Howard asked me to become his ‘Head of Policy Co-ordination’ between now and the general election . . . Gulp. Daunting stuff.” This Woosterishness is easily recognised, I think, as Johnsonian self-parody, committed at the height of Boris’s popularity. It has disappeared now.
Less easy to erase is Cameron’s liking for Socratic monologue. With the “whoops” reshuffle, Cameron gets to thinking about what he’s going to do. “While my new job may be a ‘shadowy’ one,” he writes, “there will be lots of questions to ask. Why is Parliament so bad at scrutinising laws from Europe? Why has the Government become so big and wasteful? Why do ministers announce policies on the BBC and not in Parliament? Why do ministers fail to answer questions properly? How can the Government in Parliament justify not allowing a referendum on the European constitution? Frankly, I’m looking forward to it.” To what? Asking hundreds of questions and never answering any of them?
Sometimes there is a response to his own query. Try this, from around the same time. “Does this sound familiar? You’re fed up with EU interference in everyday life. You’re worried that burdens from Brussels will make British business uncompetitive. You wonder why the EU has a flag, an anthem, a currency — and now wants a constitution and a president. So you wonder: should I vote UKIP?” The answer turns out to be, “no”.
None of this is surprising. A tyro MP, constantly employed as a shadow spokes-thing and subject to party discipline, is going to be careful about what he says. But almost as soon as the 2005 election is over, and he’s free to take up positions on his own behalf, Cameron starts to motor. Some of his definite positions, however, have been adopted a long time ago.
In 2003 he asks, “Is it time for national identity cards to deal with the problems of illegal immigration, crime and foreign visitors abusing our NHS? My answer is ‘no’. ” Cameron is on the record as being in favour of a mostly elected House of Lords, he wants membership of select committees to be decided by a vote of backbenchers, not by the whips, and — most radical of all — he supports looking at fixed-term parliaments.
That constitutes substance, as far as I can see. His less laissez-faire side demands that learning English should be compulsory for citizenship applicants, and would like to “ensure that the tax and benefits system encourages couples to get together and stay together . . . ”. Though given how losing vast sums through divorce fails to deter millions from splitting up, it’s hard to see what financial incentives would keep them together. And Cameron, a modern man, understands that there is another problem, and adds the caveat: “But we should support all families — for example, through childcare — because what matters most is that children are brought up in stable, loving homes.”
Cameron, by his own hand, is a big supporter of public services. You can even find him boasting of how he lobbied successfully for a traffic warden for Woodstock (that’s the town in Oxfordshire, not the drug-ridden American concert that took place long before Cameron became an MP), and arguing in a speech last month that Conservatives “must understand, and sincerely believe (my italics), that the money we spend on public services is a necessary good, not a regrettable evil”.
In his view the mistake that the Tories made was always seeming to want to help the middle classes — “those who already have advantages” — to buy their way out of public provision.
The Boy David wants to continue the expansion of higher education, not the contraction back to “proper university courses” so beloved of many on the Right and not a few on the Left. To fund that expansion he wants the Conservatives to support, and even extend, variable top-up fees. Public service spending comes before any tax-cutting imperative: “We will never get good schools, universities, hospitals, transport or police on the cheap.” The key is reform. Reform in the shape of co-payment, where Cameron endorses road pricing as a way to deal with congestion, and in “good ideas like Foundation Hospitals and City Academies”, which Labour failed to press ahead with because of their own party’s conservatism.
There is also the strong suggestion that Cameron would want to develop a proposal for education vouchers in the state system. He also, remarkable for a Tory, advocates making police officers more sackable and allowing the Mayor of London to appoint the Metropolitan Police commissioner. No substance?
But if you want to track the Cameronian journey, and understand that he is, if anything, an anti-populist, you have only to look at his views on Iraq. In February 2003 he opened his article for the Oxford Journal in the inevitable way: “Has the case for war fully been made? My answer is ‘not yet’. I have received dozens of letters and e-mails from constituents — with some 60 against war and just a handful in favour. But our job as MPs is not just to listen to our constituents; it is to question the Government — and to make our own judgment.”
By August this year, and with the Iraq war less popular than ever, Cameron made a speech to the Foreign Policy Centre. Before the war started, he said: “I had my concerns about the scale of what is being attempted.” He preferred deterrence to pre-emption, multilateralism to unilateral action, and was worried about the chances of success.
Then comes a passage of analysis about the global threat that might have been written by Paul Wolfowitz or Tony Blair, rather than Douglas Hurd or Ken Clarke. “Jihadism,” Cameron said, “feeds into the bewilderment, alienation and lack of progress felt by many in the Muslim world. The corruption of many states in the Middle East. The lack of democracy. The concentration of power in the hands of elites whose lifestyles are noticeably un-Islamic.” In other words, until those regimes are democratised, we will always be at risk from fundamentalism. So, we in Britain, “share a responsibility . . . to promote change, reform and liberalisation”.
Cameron, in his own write, is a reforming neocon. Here’s a passage worth quoting to anyone who says they don’t know who he is. “Just as there were figures in the 1930s who misunderstood the totalitarian wickedness of Nazism and argued that Hitler had a rational set of limited political demands, so there are people today who try to explain jihadist violence with reference to a limited set of political goals. If only, some argue, we withdrew from Iraq, or Israel made massive concessions, then we would assuage jihadist anger. That argument . . . is as limited as the belief in the 1930s that, by allowing Germany to remilitarise the Rhineland or take over the Sudetenland, we would satisfy Nazi ambitions. A willingness to cede ground and duck confrontation is interpreted as fatal weakness.”
Speech, August 24, 2005, to the Foreign Policy Centre. There, for those who want it, is the beef.
DAVE'S WISDOM
“Milton Keynes looked almost inviting.”
The Oxford Journal, September 24, 2003
“A week into the job and I’ve already seen more ceilings that Zsa Zsa Gabor and hit more floors than Frank Bruno.”
Guardian, March 25, 2004
“Do we really want to live in a country where police can ask, ‘where are your papers?’ and arrest you if you are not carrying them?”
Printed in the Oxford Journal, August 27, 2003
“I went from Jeremy Vine on Radio 2 to Andrew Neil on BBC 1 via Sky News, BBC News 24, Central Television, Radio 5 Live and lastly, a debut (and completely terrifying) appearance on Question Time . . . Apologies for this over-exposure you will all be pleased to hear that I shall now sink back into obscurity.”
Article for the Parish Pump, October 12, 2004
