We descend over a sprawling grey stone house to land on an RAF base nestled
amid the green fields of north Cornwall. It is clear by the purposeful way
he disembarks that he has reached a decision.
As in all things Cameron, he will be charming and polite but ruthless in that
very English way which my non-English husband says means you just know
someone is stabbing you in the back. We drive to the quay in the fishing
port of Newlyn, where a phalanx of photographers are waiting. An elderly
couple on holiday from Derbyshire are almost knocked over in the rush.
“What’s happening?” they ask. “Is an important ship coming in?” Before I can
answer, the Conservative leader has swept through.
“David Davis has made a very courageous and a very brave decision,” he tells
the waiting cameras, adding: “I wish him well.” There would, however, be no
help in his by-election from Central Office, neither admin nor funds, and
his job as shadow minister would not be kept open.
Later, when we meet the local fishing community, I realise that somehow,
between coming to the decision and keeping his planeload of girls amused
with corny fish jokes, Cameron has absorbed an impressive amount of detail
from the file. Even an irate fisherman who accosts him perilously near the
water’s edge cannot deter him from his purpose.
My week with him started inauspiciously with potty-training and marriage
counselling. We meet up at his Edwardian house. In the entrance hall I step
over a potty and a child’s bike. The Tory leader is tanned and healthy from
a week’s holiday in Spain and is holding his two-year-old son, Arthur –
called Elwen by the family – who is tossing around the morning papers,
taking a particular fancy to the Telegraph business section. “We just
started potty-training yesterday,” says Cameron. “It’s a nightmare.”
It is not easy asking tough policy questions of a man who is telling you about
a messy incident with some Bob the Builder pants, so I look around. The
family only moved in last year, and charcoal nudes lean against the walls
waiting to be hung. In his efforts to appear green, Cameron famously
commissioned an eco-makeover of the house within hours of capturing the Tory
leadership, but it looks nothing out of the ordinary. When I ask him, he
pats the walls. “Insulation,” he replies, “boring but important.” It also
has solar panels, a tank in the garden to catch rainwater to use for
washing, and planning permission has just come through for the “windmill” –
a wind turbine on the roof.
The abstract paintings on the wall are by his wife, Samantha (she studied fine
art before becoming creative director at Smythson, the luxury Bond Street
stationers). By the fireplace hangs a framed front page of The Sun from
February last year. It’s a photograph of Cameron in which a hoodie
brandishes an imaginary gun behind him, under the headline “I suppose a hug
is out of the question?”
If I were a politician I can’t imagine inviting a strange journalist into my
house for breakfast, particularly when your spouse is away on business in
Spain sourcing leather and the nanny is off unwell. But Cameron is modern
man personified, dispensing Weetabix and brushing the tangles out of
four-year-old Nancy’s hair in between telling me about his discussions with
George Bush over Afghanistan. Just as he is getting to the interesting part
about confronting Bush over the two parallel military operations, little
Elwen thrusts a Dr Seuss book at us, nearly knocking over the goldfish bowl
in which Amy the fish swims in circles, lonely after her partner Ruby jumped
out. “One day, Dr Seuss is going to end up in one of my speeches,” says
Cameron.
At the other end of the table is a wheelchair in which sits six-year-old Ivan,
who was born with cerebral palsy and severe epilepsy and needs constant
care. Ivan looks out silently from dark, long-lashed eyes as Cameron
tenderly brushes his teeth and administers medicine, ticking a chart that
shows the little boy needs 21 drugs a day. The disability of his first child
was a huge shock in an otherwise gilded life, and has brought Cameron into
close contact with the NHS. It turns out that the night before our
breakfast, he was at the hospital with Ivan for an x-ray and had not slept
much afterwards because the younger two had crawled into his bed. He is
about to change a nappy when the phone rings. “That’ll be Samantha making
sure I’ve remembered everything. It’ll be like one of those Fawlty Towers
conversations – yes, dear, yes, dear, yes, dear.”
Outside the house, the driver of a passing van recognises Cameron and stops to
shake hands. “You’re taller than you look on telly,” he declares. He is
right. At 6 ft 1in, Cameron is much taller than I imagined, perhaps because
of his small hands and feet. He is also posher, with that fresh-faced
public-school born-to-rule manner and a rare knack for putting people at
ease. When we arrive at the grim concrete Harrow council building that
houses the marriage-guidance centre, the women are quickly bowled over. He
gathers the counsellors in a circle of chairs and says: “I was lying in bed
with my wife the other night and told her I was coming to Relate. She said,
‘We’ve been together for 13 years. Maybe we should go for a bit of a check.’
”
They all laugh, then he gets serious and shiny-faced. “I’m here to learn,” he
says and starts asking questions. He quickly establishes that by far the
biggest stress point in a relationship is having a baby and that half the
calls to Relate are now initiated by men. They tell him their funding has
been halved over the past three years to just £24m, while the cost of social
breakdown is estimated at £20 billion. Britain has more single parents, more
teenage pregnancies and more underage drinking than anywhere else in Europe,
and the UK was ranked bottom for children’s wellbeing out of 21
industrialised nations in a Unicef report last year.
This is grist to the Cameron mill. A Conservative government would, he says,
invest in strengthening the role of families and helping keep relationships
intact by, for example, giving tax breaks to married couples. “At the moment
we have this ludicrous system where we pay couples to live apart,” he says.
He would also expand sex education in schools to cover relationships and
encourage business to offer flexible childcare, and, by the way, equal pay.
