THE CAMERON effect puts me in mind of one of those meringues you can break a tooth on: fluffy, sweet and light — yet strangely tough. One senses basalt beneath the blancmange.
The effect has been electrifying. Something odd is crackling through the wires of the good old Tory party and at first I struggled to explain it within myself and to explain it in those many Conservative supporters and party members whom I meet. And not just Tories, but bewildered floating voters too, uncertain how to vote.
And I know what you think I am about to write. Well, hang on, because you might be wrong. You think I’m about to write that at long last Her Majesty’s loyal opposition have “smelt the coffee”; that for the first time in eight years they have begun to believe that new Labour are vulnerable; that the Tories really could win; that under a fresh new leader . . . something stirring . . . emerging from a long sleep . . . break with the past . . . reaching out . . . one nation . . . in touch with the 21st century . . . wind of change . . . not just make the change, be the change . . .
. . . Yes, yes, all that. True no doubt, all true. “Splendid, splendid,” as old Willie Whitelaw used to burble. Over the next six weeks of leadership hustings we shall have our fill of this sort of stuff until it’s coming out of our ears as David Cameron — warm yet bracing, crisp yet cuddly, challenging yet reassuring, soft yet flinty, bold yet unspecific, and bathed in his own special brand of personal freshness — roves our nation from shore to shore, spraying out the banalities in truly industrial measure. Cowering citizens will duck as from every TV set into every living-room sofa thud the clichés about renewal, relevance and a new lease on life, until the very words “reach out” trigger an involuntary gagging of the throat muscle.
Listening to him and David Davis debating the Conservative future on the Today programme yesterday morning, one was reminded of the US Senator William McAdoo’s assessment of Warren Harding whose speeches “resembled an army of phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea. Sometimes these meandering words would actually capture a straggling thought and bear it triumphantly, a prisoner in their midst, until it died of servitude and overwork.” A pitiful cluster of once-happy Tory thoughts are to meet a horrible death in this way before Christmas.
They are necessary sacrifices to a good cause. I do think Mr Cameron is the Tory future and I do think it will work. I shall be voting unhesitatingly for him in the ballot of party members.
But having been an early convert to the Regiment of Cameroons gives me time to step back now and with a cooler eye assess what is really going on. Something is stirring beneath the Tory surface that has little to do with change and much to do with continuity.
Frightened for its life, the Tory party is turning back to the toffs. For the first time in 40 years they are looking to a proper top-public-school boy to save them. Mr Cameron’s Eton education and discreetly upper-crust bearing are not handicaps, surmountable or otherwise. They are assets. In all kinds of subliminal ways they are working to his advantage.
A Peasants’ Revolt took place in the Conservative Party in 1965. A reform among Tory MPs ended the practice of allowing a new leader to “emerge” and introduced the grubby business of voting. Edward Heath was the beneficiary. A builder’s son and railwayman’s grandson, he was the first boy from a state school ever to lead the party. Private Eye, a magazine and institution to which there has always been a snooty undertone, dubbed him The Grocer, and, mocking his lower-middle-Kent vowels, called his yacht Morning Cleowd.
When Heath fell, the toffs attempted a comeback, fully expecting their candidate, the Winchester-educated former Scots Guards officer, William Whitelaw, to win. In vain did Mr Whitelaw attempt the common touch by standing gingerly beside an ironing-board for photographs. His defeat by Margaret Thatcher, a grammar-school girl whose father had owned a small shop in Grantham, was seen (I remember) as little short of a usurpation of the natural order. Thus was ushered in the 15-year reign of the Grocer’s daughter.
Less confident of success this time, the toffs fielded an Old Etonian, Douglas Hurd, when she fell. But the Peasants were still riding high. They chose a grammar-school boy who hadn’t even been to university, the son of a circus artist, John Major.
When he fell, the toffs did not even try. William Hague, a comprehensive-school-educated son of a Rotherham soda-pop manufacturer, won easily. On his demise the middle-ranking air force officer’s son, Iain Duncan Smith, had not attended a state school and did make some claims to toffhood-through-marriage but — crucially — the toffs themselves never accepted him as one of their own; and when he fell the party reverted to a Llanelli grammar school boy of modest, immigrant origins, Michael Howard. The toffs were lying low.
But they had not surrendered and nor were they idle. A young pretender had been quietly groomed at Eton and Oxford, and was rising effortlessly through the ranks of the Parliamentary Conservative Party.
David Cameron had been cannily chosen. No aristocrat — just the son of someone who was something in the City — and no plutocrat (though hardly poor), young David had married well but wore his toffhood very, very lightly. He even called himself “Dave”. His accent was not affected — smart rather than grand — and his manner was modest. He was a modern young man with modern friends and modern attitudes. He was genuinely likeable and likeably genuine: in no sense an impostor. But from the first he showed a presence of mind, a native caution combined with an open affability, which boded well. And he was careful in his opinions, seldom sticking his neck out except once, on a Home Affairs committee, on the subject of drugs — and in a liberal direction. What looked then like a risky piece of position-taking must in retrospect be judged shrewdly precautionary.
As humbly born and bog-standardly educated David Davis planned what was meant to be an effortless rise to power, and as the loud voices and noisy laughter of confident Tory populists — clinking glasses to the end of immigration, the expulsion of Gypsies and the Fall of Brussels — filled the saloon-bars of politics, their 40-year interregnum was drawing to a close. The Peasants’ Revolt was almost over.
October 2005. The Peasants’ Rout. David Cameron has — well, emerged. The toffs are back in the saddle.
How do I know he’s one? I’m sorry but this is England and you just do. Can’t explain. Is it the relaxed air of command? The hint of a tetchiness courteously suppressed? The apparent listening ear? The voice? The suits? The way he never drops names or pulls rank in a pushy way? The way you don’t know what he’s thinking but do not doubt he thinks?
I cannot say, but of this I can assure you. It’s being recognised, mostly unconsciously, all across the shires and suburbs of England. People are saying “heard him for the first time last week — like the sound of this chap” or “saw him on Question Time — good, wasn’t he?” and they do not themselves know why they are saying it, but part of the reason is class. In both senses, Mr Cameron has class. What the English will tell you is that he “sounds like a natural leader”; what they mean, although they may not realise that this is what they mean, is that in ways they cannot begin to explain, Mr Cameron sounds like an officer and a gentleman.
This still matters to us. So do not be fooled by all the talk of Tory revolution. This is counter-revolution. Return of the Toffs. What a coup!
