Through misty sunshine and a whiff of wood smoke, a pheasant scuttles along a
lane wearing a Barbour and a blue rosette. This is rural Tory England, the
countryside with its glad rags on, where every stone wall is a masterpiece.
On a glorious Saturday afternoon, a more honey-on-toast Cotswolds idyll
would be hard to conjure. David Cameron lives here in a perfect cottage,
when he is not in his rented London house, or his new eco-palace round the
corner (with a wind turbine, solar panels and a rainwater harvester), or his
country house in Devon, which he doesn’t get to much these days. Cameron’s
neighbour Lord Chadlington, brother of John Selwyn Gummer, owns the
magnificent Queen Anne manor in this Oxfordshire village, and also its
little farm and the pool in which the Camerons are invited to swim. Last
summer they splashed for a week in tropical temperatures when the heating
was left on by mistake; hardly a green experience, but Cameron is not one to
let dogma get in the way of a nice life, and good for him.
I think this last bit as I am sitting at the kitchen table of the leader of
the opposition while he feeds his eldest son, who is five. In other
politicians this might be the ultimate presentational flourish – and Cameron
is nothing if not a slick PR operator – the devoted father manfully wielding
spaghetti hoops. But it is not that. Ivan Cameron, a beautiful child with
raven-dark hair and faraway eyes, is profoundly disabled, with cerebral
palsy and epilepsy. He doesn’t walk or talk or smile. He is lying across his
father’s lap exposing a hole in his abdomen through which a tube is
delivering first, drugs, and second, liquid food. “When children visit,”
smiles Cameron, “and won’t eat their tea, I tell them I’m going to put one
of these in their tummy.”
The disability of David and Samantha Cameron’s first child is the only sadness
in an otherwise enviable life; yet Ivan casts no shadow over it. On a walk
this afternoon, Cameron wrestled Ivan’s buggy through muddy fields to visit
the pigs and lambs on a nearby farm, carrying him when the terrain got too
heavy. He then picked up a lamb for him to touch. “Can you feel the lambkin,
Ivan?” he asked gently. Thankfully, we don’t vote for politicians on the
basis of how sweetly they minister to sick children, but when I have
forgotten every word Cameron said to me, and long after the next election is
won or lost, that tenderness will remain. He must be careful, of course,
that Ivan doesn’t become a sympathy card or an excuse: in recent days he has
been claimed as the reason why Cameron took a controversial flight instead
of a train (to discuss a new wheelchair). He was also cited as part of the
reason why non-bio nappies were found in the family’s bins (they don’t make
them big enough), but the family had also “run out” of baby Elwen’s right-on
Pampers.
Personally, I’m relieved Cameron is not self-righteous (about the environment,
or anything), but I’m also surprised that he imagined he would get away with
private flights and unrifled rubbish bins, given his agenda. Is there an
arrogance that makes him careless? Or, more likely, do the pressures of
career and family and lack of help – Samantha works, Ivan needs
round-the-clock care – mean he doesn’t have time to walk the walk? This
weekend, Ivan’s carer Gita is off sick; even so, for a wealthy man, Cameron
seems more stretched than he should be by childcare crises.
The first time I met him in London, 36-year-old Samantha was away, the boiler
had broken, Elwen was pushing organic porridge up his nose, and
three-year-old Nancy was insisting on going swimming. (“Never give them
choice,” muttered the practised father. “They always choose the last thing
they did,” which must be just as true of his own back benches.) At the park
he spent all his time wiping down filthy swings with sodden tissues for “my
little Nance”. It was hardly Brideshead Revisited, as his critics like to
claim. We stopped at his local cafe, where outdoor heaters were blasting out
wanton heat. “We won’t ask for them to be turned off,” he had smiled. “We
didn’t turn them on after all.”
It is just as well to get a glimpse of the private man, for at the next
election, Cameron will offer voters a powerful “trust me” message, at a time
when nobody trusts politicians. “Character is far more important than
policy,” he tells me on our country walk, and you sense he’s crossing his
fingers in his pocket as he says it. “After we’ve forgotten the tax changes
in the last budget, what we will remember is that it was a con.”
Brought up in rural west Berkshire, Cameron is smoothly urbane – both camps
covered, then. Nothing much ruffles his cool; there is a hint of a lazy
“yah” (far too helpful to Rory Bremner), and an upper-class mock-jadedness
in which arduous or tedious things are pronounced “boring”. He displays none
of John Major’s peevishness or Michael Howard’s formality, which makes him
easy company, fun to work for, pleasant to interview. The hope is that his
lightness of touch will play well against what his team (maybe wrongly)
assume will be Granite Gordon’s unpopularity, but what fires him up?
I see him being praised by Al Gore as a champion of the planet, and am amused
to discover he only started riding the famous bike because his friend the
shadow chancellor, George Osborne, did, and couldn’t give Cameron a lift
home from the Commons any more. I see him admired in Brussels as a dynamic
leader with little interest in the “architecture” of treaties and
constitutions, when his Eurosceptic colleagues (who think of little else)
swear he’s one of them. I see him present himself as a hero of the
dispossessed, fretting with a pained expression about the widening gap
between the “haves and the have-nots”, when not so long ago he campaigned
against the minimum wage.
Cameron’s big idea is Social Responsibility, the words that beam out from
behind him on the screen as he gives his speeches. It sounds highly Blairite
– same old rights-versus-responsibilities rhetoric – but he insists it is no
such thing. “Blair’s response to a problem is a summit in Downing Street, a
new law. He has created 3,000 new criminal offences! Mine is to ask what the
family can do, what the voluntary sector can do, what the community can do.”
He is enamoured of the voluntary sector. In some ways this is an extension of
the old Conservative charitable instinct, the noblesse oblige on which
Cameron was reared. His mother, Mary, a magistrate for 40 years, was also
involved in Mencap and the Newbury Spring Festival, and the family ethos
revolved around recognition of their own good fortune. “I don’t want it to
sound like welfare on the cheap,” he says of the community projects he wants
to extend. “It’s about trusting people on the ground. Lots of falling-apart
families aren’t getting the attention because the social workers are dealing
with the serious abuse cases. Is the answer to give more money to social
services or to boost Kids Company [the south London charity run by Camilla
Batmanghelidjh]?” Out and about with him, as he dismisses grammar schools
and assisted places, refuses to back down on air-travel levies, the world
seems to have gone mad. A home-counties Tory agent confides that the
constituency tea-makers think he’s a “communist” but are keeping their
“traps shut”
as long as the ratings keep climbing.
Maybe someone should remind them that Tony Blair was twice as far ahead in the
polls at this point in his leadership of Labour, with the propeller of Tory
sleaze behind him. But Dave is working it; wooing the liberals, selling
himself hard – as blatant as a pole dancer with rent to pay. At youth
programmes for dropout kids in Bradford, in his Witney constituency, and in
west London, he tells them all he’s on their side. At the Spear youth
project in Hammersmith, there is one-to-one coaching for the youths who
would otherwise be, in the words of one helper, “vandalising your car”. It
runs on just £150,000 a year, it is effective, and Cameron would like to
roll out its ethic across the nation to replace what he calls Brown’s
failing New Deal.
Cameron will tell you that the Conservative party has changed, but since he
only arrived 17 months ago, how can it possibly have had time? The shadow
cabinet boasts the same old faces, elected on Michael Howard’s manifesto and
his notorious campaign “Are You Thinking What We’re Thinking?” There is John
Redwood (global-warming dissident), David Davis (warm on capital
punishment), with William Hague as foreign secretary, who, as leader, talked
of England being “a foreign land” to its own citizens. The exiled lefties
and Lib Dems might flirt with Cameron, but could they seriously stomach his
chosen few?
The idea that Davis could have become the leader is salutary, for the new,
nice Tory party seems to have been a mere option rather than a historical
inevitability; the result of one vote rather than years of soul-searching
and argument. The last old-left candidate to make a serious challenge for
Labour’s leadership was on Neil Kinnock’s watch 20 years ago. Cameron’s old
guard, by contrast, are at his elbow,
probably living in silent hope that,
once he has charmed the electorate, they can all (Dave included) get back to
the serious business of slashing taxes that is buried in their DNA.
Meanwhile, inconveniently for Cameron, there is no big symbol to attack, no
clause 4 to dismantle, thereby dramatising his hard-won progress; instead,
he gives the traditionalists
small heart attacks with headlines about
hugging hoodies. His only evidence of real change is his A-list, the
priority candidates put forward for winnable seats. Since its introduction
last year, more than a third of available seats have gone to women. He will
tell you to look at Priti Patel in Essex, candidate for the safe seat of
Witham, tipped to be the first Asian woman in
parliament, or the new MPs
such as Grant Shapps and Mike Penning, who both arrived from a background of
campaigning on the health service. He talks about the furious junior doctors
whose rally he addressed, who have “crossed a threshold with this
government. People in the public sector are now prepared to listen to the
Conservative party”. He believes that transforming the Tories was nowhere
near as monumental a task as creating new Labour. “Their core beliefs and
values had to go: unions, nationalisation,” he says. “We have had to catch
up with modern Britain, change priorities, do more on public services, less
on the European issue, but never ditch what we stand for.”
It is a long time since the Tories have been on the up: their last convincing
victory was the 1983 election. But in February, the new boy was 13 points
clear of Gordon Brown in a poll asking whom this country would prefer to see
as its next leader. Cameron has come from nowhere to be everywhere. Or
rather he has trodden a glittering path from Eton to Oxford to the polenta
suppers of the Notting Hill set, and must now take charge and tell his
incandescent Eurosceptics and pining Thatcherites to “get over it”.
He is 40 years old. He is gregarious and more confident than anyone you have
ever met. He is so relaxed that he doesn’t bother to wear a watch. Apart
from his ecological fervour – which isn’t remotely fervent when you get
close up – he is a conventional type, with his membership of White’s and his
country weekends. He can scratch a pig’s back so effectively that the
creature sighs (this I saw with my own eyes); he can castrate a ram with a
pair of pliers (I didn’t see this, thank God). His wife, an heiress and
baronet’s daughter, might be creative director of the Bond Street stationers
Smythson, but he isn’t fashionable, give or take a penchant for fancy
trainers. He drives a Volkswagen Caravelle, with room for the wheelchair,
owns one suit by Timothy Everest, a couple by Paul Smith, most from Marks &
Spencer. This month he was voted runner-up to the Bond actor Daniel Craig in
a best-dressed list, which tells you more
about his media popularity – and
our need to
celebrate finally getting an exciting leader of HM’s opposition
– than it does his tailoring.Unlike his opponent across the dispatch box,
Cameron wears his leadership lightly: there is none of the restlessness that
classically marks out innovators, itchy to be getting on with it. Maybe part
of him is wondering if it is all a dream. Not so long ago he was one of what
George Osborne, who ran his leadership campaign, calls “the insurgents, the
rebels coming out of the woods”. Now in Westminster they talk of him winning
the next election. Nothing – not gossip, tabloids nor even the inevitably
teary endings of all political careers – is going to dent the happiness of
the youthful leader, which tumbles and tinkles over all we do together.
We don’t know what his main policies are yet. Nor does he, because most of his
“policy reviews” have yet to report, but he thinks backbone matters more
than detail. He pushes ecology, families, tax breaks for married couples,
equality; he has ditched the bit of the manifesto he drafted for Howard at
the last election that offered a chance to use NHS money and go private. He
has no private health care himself.
“We have ended the culture of encouraging people to opt out of the NHS and
state education,” he says. “It was stopping us getting into the argument
about reforming public services.” He is trying to get his three-year-old
daughter into a Kensington Church of England school. He doesn’t rule out
private schools, but would “prefer” to use the state sector, which is a
dramatic divergence from his own background.
The Cameron message has been touchy-feely: warm, apolitical issues that have
made him a man for all generations, all tastes. Irresistible. But for a hero
of the newly caring eco-Cons, his history is incongruous. He was an adviser
to a right-wing chancellor, Norman Lamont, then to a draconian home
secretary, Michael Howard. Where is the track record of pushing for change,
the clarion calls to reform? To put it bluntly, where is the equivalent of
the young Blair getting his ears boxed at Hackney South and Shoreditch
Labour party in the early 1980s? These questions make him uncomfortable. He
frowns because, really, there isn’t an answer. “Well, you know, advisers
advise and ministers decide. When you’re leader of the party, you have your
chance to put your stamp on direction.” He was a Howard protégé; now he
promulgates a loving line on juvenile delinquency, with no epiphany to
describe, no alibi or excuse for an apparent change of heart, which can
easily look like a cynical swerve. “Lunch is ready,” says his wife. Shall we
continue our interview later, I ask. “No, let’s wrap it up now, then we can
have a nice lunch.”
Lord Chadlington’s gardener occasionally drops off half a pig to the cottage –
Cameron has cooked every part successfully except the trotters. The salty
ham we eat is from the local farm shop, and so is the pork pie; the
smoked-mackerel paté is a Cameron speciality. In the kitchen sits a pumpkin
the size of a football, grown in his garden. Tonight the editor of The Sun,
Rebekah Wade, is being treated to a Jamie Oliver roast-chicken recipe cooked
by Cameron. The cottage, a converted barn is tranquil; there are scuffed
carpets, comfy sofas, tons of framed family pictures, one of Sam in a bikini
“looking like Marilyn Monroe”, according to her besotted husband.
At lunch, on this apparently typical Saturday, there are two friends present,
Chris and Venetia, an Economist journalist and a publisher, with their
children. It is a casual gathering; the toast for the paté is plonked
straight on the table in front of me, so I hand a slice to Chris, who seems
unbothered. Samantha eats salad with her fingers, cheerfully asking if
anyone wants the mango, because it needs eating up today. Do I want some
milk in my coffee? My host sets down a two-litre bottle of semi-skimmed on
the table. “Here you are!” he smiles. (“Home from home,” I smile back, but I
don’t mean it: being of a lower social order, I’d have feared judgment and
found a jug.) There is a babble of chat about what a Stalinist Gordon is,
and a laugh when Cameron says he has never heard of the girl who describes
him as a “good kisser” in a new biography. “She must have snogged my
brother.”
With his brains and stellar education, and the connections of a Waugh-like
jeunesse dorée, Cameron was always destined for a fine life, so why inflict
the miseries of political leadership on himself? He has seen the stress, the
opprobrium and ridicule heaped on Blair; how the job saps energy, ages you,
makes wives targets, children vulnerable, or spoilt, or both. Surely the
rigours are only worth suffering in the cause of a burning belief, which
Cameron seems rather proud of lacking? But no, for an ambitious man like
this, the prestige of the top job is more than enough to justify its
hardships. “I distrust people with too much of a mission. Other people’s
missions often involve everyone else making huge sacrifices.
I am
distrustful of the grand plan. It’s not me.”
He and Samantha had dinner with William and Ffion the other night – green Thai
curry at the Hagues’ London flat – and Hague warned Cameron to make sure he
delegated, had a strong private office, made time to relax. But somehow I
don’t imagine he is in danger of burnout. “You have to keep mind, body and
soul together,” he says firmly. “You have to keep family together. It might
mean getting flak for taking planes instead of trains, but you have to do
it, otherwise you’ll be exhausted.” Family first? Fine in opposition, but
impossible – not to mention undesirable – in No 10.
Why does Cameron want to be PM? “I think I could do a good job,” he asserts.
“I can put a team together and I have an idea that drives me – which is
giving people more control over their lives.” He is a career rather than a
conviction politician, but too highborn to be written off as a mere scaler
of the greasy pole. He is a scion of the class that, deep down, believes it
was born to rule; this does not, by the way, make its members bad at the
job, just lazy in their assumptions about how hard they need to fight to get
there.
Every time Cameron says “I am passionate,” you feel he’s ticking a box;
conversely, every time he says he would have a rational, level-headed
approach to government, you find yourself rather convinced. When I ask him
what sort of Conservative he is, the names of the one-nation greats like Rab
Butler, Macmillan and his particular hero, Disraeli, are called forth.
“Disraeli did more than Gladstone for the poor. He cleared the slums,
legalised trade unions. Macmillan and Butler continued that tradition by
emphasising housing and a share-owning, property-owning democracy.” He stops
for a moment before adding: “It’s what Margaret Thatcher did when she
reached out to the moderate trade unionists.” Maggie and Rab in the same
breath? So buoyant is he feeling in these heady days of revival that he even
dares to praise his former idol, whom every leader in recent years has been
duty-bound to disavow. He and Samantha attended the Lady’s intimate 77th
birthday lunch, but her new bronze statue in parliament unnerves him. “I
feel she is pointing her finger at me,” he laughs with a shudder. If he can
make inroads into northern cities such as Newcastle, where the Tories are a
ghost party – only there in spirit – maybe that iron gaze will soften.
Cameron calls himself a “liberal Conservative”, innately suspicious of state
action, a champion of continuity, community and, yes, “society”. “People
don’t want you to tear everything up,”
he says, “and if I become prime
minister, I won’t.
I don’t believe in the Year Zero. Pragmatism and common
sense are what’s important. We fear people who have great utopian visions.”
He recounts with obvious pleasure that one of his older members approached
him in the House recently, remarking: “There’s nothing new about what you’re
doing, you’re just taking us back to the days of Rab.” And somewhere, far
away, I can hear poor Norman Tebbit’s knuckles cracking.
If image is the god of modern politics, here is a perfect ratings-booster. On
another Saturday morning, in a scrappy green space near northwest London’s
Harrow Road, local boys are playing football on caged-off tarmac, while in a
green corner, volunteers are planting new trees on a Conservative Green
Action Day. Everyone on the project is smiling. It is the sort of morning
that bears the promise of a warm, blossomy spring, and aptly so, for a new
dawn is on the mind of everybody here, especially the group of old friends
sitting on a grassy bank.
In the muddy patch at the bottom of the bank, Nancy Cameron is making mud pies
while her baby brother attempts to consume a snail, and her godfather,
George Osborne, looking about 17 with his fresh complexion and neatly ironed
blue jumper, laughs that we will be hearing more of the little missy in
years to come: “This is what an It girl looks like at three.” Samantha,
Modigliani-beautiful, with her long pale face and glossy hair, sits gently
cradling Ivan.
The papers the next day will show the leader of the Conservative party
shovelling earth, wearing eco-trainers made from old fireman’s trousers,
with green laces. Watching them, you can’t help feeling that the freshness
of this crowd, their good looks, their reasonable attitudes and jokiness,
after years of soapboxes and finger-wagging, make them a very plausible sort
of Conservative elite, beguiling in a way that could – if they play their
press cleverly – seduce the young professional vote.
A friend of theirs says Sam claims not to be interested in politics and tells
Cameron publicly that most people haven’t heard of what he’s banging on
about, at which he just smiles, a self-immolation the “Cameroons” think dead
cool.
Does Cameron look and sound like modern Britain, I asked the party chairman,
Francis Maude. Yes, said Maude; private polling shows that voters think him
a down-to-earth family man. “Though he comes from privilege, he doesn’t lead
a privileged life.” Four houses? A private jet to finesse the design of a
personalised wheelchair? I nearly laugh. By the standards of those they want
the new inclusive party to represent, the couple are rich, which does not
stop Cameron lecturing us that the pursuit of wealth is irrelevant, indeed
injurious, to our welfare and our children’s development. He said it to
business leaders in May 2006, to Conservative councillors in Leeds, and to
hard-pressed parents, who, he seems to believe, should work less. Is there
anything more infuriating than being told by a rich bloke that money isn’t
everything? But this is Nice Dave’s burden: whenever he criticises our empty
materialism, a central tenet of his “social revival”, the hackles of a
chippy nation will be prone to rise. I wish he were right when he claims
that Britain has grown out of its class-consciousness – “I think we don’t
care about all that any more” – but in the north, 67% still believe the
Tories are the voice of the “already quite well-off rather than ordinary
working people”.
When the story broke about his pot-smoking escapade at Eton, it wasn’t so much
the drugs as the photograph of Cameron posing snootily with his Bullingdon
Club chums that incited negative comment. But Cameron’s background is as
much of an asset as it is an encumbrance. It sugars the pill of his velvet
revolution, reassures the loyalists as they puzzle over his refusal to
repeal inheritance tax. And in some ways, Cameron is more of a traditional
Tory male than his eco-trainers would have us believe. He admits to being “a
dinosaur” about education, believing in learning by rote; he talks of pupils
“obeying” teachers, claims in an interview on housing that “an Englishman’s
home is his castle”. Indeed. In his luscious Oxfordshire constituency, with
Blenheim Palace, touristy Woodstock and the village of Bladon, where
Churchill is buried, he has the “happiest moments of my week”.
At Base 33, a youth organisation on Witney High Street, Cameron is responding
to a Unicef report claiming British children are the loneliest in the
developed world. “We have too many children behaving like adults,” he tells
the audience. “And too many adults behaving like children.” In the humidity
of the room, he comes over with cool clarity. (“I have top-lip paranoia,” he
admits later. “Was it okay, not sweating?”)
Afterwards he sits with a group of young people; hears how they have nowhere
to go. One of the lads had become a father at 17. Cameron asks if he is
working. “At McDonald’s,” he replies, sheepishly, as the others hoot with
derision, but Cameron silences them, instantly protective. “No, the best way
to get a job is to have a job.” As we leave, he says to the boy who asked a
question about the dopegate scandal, “You’ll be on the news later,” and the
kid laughs: “Yeah, I know.” He muses that the right place for these kids on
winter nights is at home, “but they can’t be
there; they’ll say, ‘My dad
hits me.’ They’re not bad kids, you know”.
He laughs heartily when I venture that his background isn’t the best story to
enhance an allegedly transformed party, and it is in that laugh – its
candour and genuine humour – that I like him best. “Absolutely right! It’s
hopeless! We needed someone from outside the corral! But I don’t drop my
aitches to hide it.” When he insists he is a “meritocrat”, we must assume
that he means he favours the ideal, not that he personally rose on talent
alone. Possibly unwisely, he has surrounded himself with upper-crust
cronies:
15 old Etonians on the Tory front bench, and more in his private
office.
I want to know when he turned green. His answer seems to be that he has always
loved our green and pleasant land. And that a Thatcher speech in 1988 “woke
us up to green issues”. It is a pretty lame explanation for his commitment
to an issue that has reversed his fortunes and become his key connection
with the young. He never climbed a doomed tree or joined Friends of the
Earth. How do we know that he didn’t just select a please-all issue to
demonstrate change, altruism and rejuvenation in the party? “No, it came
from genuine enthusiasm,” insists Osborne. “We rationalised it after the
event.”
Cameron does have a powerful emotional attachment to rural England, but
whether he would swap his share portfolio for a great leap forward in
climate change is anybody’s guess. My own is that, having alighted on a
vote-winning agenda, he has absorbed the innate morality of the green
campaign, rather like parents who attend church to get their children into
faith schools and, while they are there, rediscover religion. Expediency
might come first, but that doesn’t make the belief a travesty.
When it comes to remembering his personal past, he has borrowed his pal Boris
Johnson’s “blissful sponge of amnesia”. Sensible. The only childhood worth
claiming for those in public life is one spent escaping sink estates;
anything more elicits envy or derision or a yawn. The third of four
children, he grew up in a rectory in Peasemore, near Newbury, with ponies
and air rifles and a spaniel called Susie. Descended from “a long line of
stockbrokers”, at seven he was sent to Heatherdown prep school near Ascot,
where the younger royal princes were educated.
At Eton he played tennis, went to the pub.
“I didn’t spend my whole time
reading Hansard.” Wouldn’t he consider Eton for little Elwen? “No, you
shouldn’t have to pay vast sums of money for a good education.” At Brasenose
College, Oxford, he read PPE, joined the union but did not debate, and won a
first. He joined the party’s research department in 1988. He met Samantha
“properly” in late 1992 when she was invited by his younger sister Clare on
a family holiday to Italy. “Sam says I was the first boyfriend she had with
a car. It was a very dodgy second-hand white BMW. Nobody broke into it
because they assumed it belonged to the local hood. We didn’t get married
until 1996; we were engaged for years. I think she was too embarrassed to
tell her friends she was going out with a Tory.”
After only a year as a special adviser at the Treasury, and a year at the Home
Office, Cameron left the Westminster village to run corporate communications
at Carlton, where the chairman, Michael Green, predicted a future for him on
the company’s board. “I wanted to make money and learn about business in
case politics didn’t work out.” He won the safe seat of Witney in 2001,
arriving at the Commons on the same day as Osborne, and with other
like-minded young Tories dared to dream of a party revival, based on Blair’s
warm appeal rather than Thatcher’s iron fist. So far, the project has worked
in the south, nurtured by Cameron’s ability to deliver a simple message well
and his agile side-stepping of thorny issues such as immigration and Europe.
Is he scared the latter might return to bite him? “There is a new desire to
win in the Conservative party,” he says, “and a recognition that it is time
to stop picking fluff out of our navel and concentrate on the enemy.”
Was I impressed by Cameron? Oh, yes. He is blessed with charisma and
authority. Was I suspicious of him? Naturally. Is he driven more by personal
ambition and private happiness than a crusade to reinvent the world? No
doubt about it. On a trip to Bradford to inspect a regeneration project, he
is joined by that sleek old beast Michael Heseltine, who begins a long
head-down mumble to Cameron about the crushing grip the chancellor has on
Whitehall. Cameron nods, replying that Brown has a “great brain” but that he
will struggle with responsiveness as PM, being too much of a planner. “We’re
quite happy Blair’s going,” he tells Hezza. “He’s trying to get out of the
shit and can’t. Brown thinks he still can, so we have to push his face back
in it.” For a conciliatory Libran, this man relishes a fight more than you’d
imagine.
