THERE are two David Camerons hotly tipped to lead the Conservative Party. One is David with a self-confessed “corny” CV, the Old Etonian with swept-back hair, golden boy to Thatcher, Major and Howard. He married into the upper classes, and has a faintly patrician air that fails to straddle the class divide.

The other is Dave, as friends know him, the Skoda-driving sports fan who loves The Smiths, Radiohead, and trashy TV. Dave married an artist, hangs out with bohemian types from his media days and cooks for his two young children, who he wants to go into the state system.

Most significantly, Dave is the father of a severely disabled son, whose photos cover the walls of his Commons office, and is seen as one of the biggest influences on his political life, both in his commitment to public services and his ability to empathise with those in adversity. This has put the steel into the gilded youth.

And it is this private Dave Cameron — he has not, like Anthony Blair, gone public with his more down-to-earth moniker — that must convince the party of his mass appeal if he is to triumph in a leadership battle this autumn. He battles himself as much as his rival David Davis.

“He’s respected rather than popular and, yes, maybe jealousy plays a part,” one close Tory colleague said. “But I think that’s because he does keep private. Those that know him are real fans.”

At Oxford, curiously similar to Tony Blair, Cameron shunned political associations and the pompous debating union, despite the fact that his great and great-great-grandfathers were Tory MPs. Instead the stockbroker’s son played tennis and stayed up late in the bar. “Even though one knew he was a Conservative, he in no sense brought his politics into his academic life,” said Vernon Bogdanor, his politics professor at Brasenose.

Professor Bogdanor remembers Cameron as “one of the ablest students I’ve had”. His pupil took a high First, but what marked him out was an interest in the other side of the argument. “He was able to reach out to people who would not normally vote Conservative,” Professor Bogdanor said.

From university he went straight to the Conservative Research Department under Margaret Thatcher and became the instant leader of the “brat pack”, the bright young things who were key advisers in John Major’s Government. Now unofficial head of the Notting Hill set, the posh but “modernising” thirtysomething Tory MPs, at 38 Cameron has been a bright young thing for more than ten years.

But those who believe his rise has been charmed and effortless should cast their minds back to Black Wednesday. At just 25 Cameron had already risen to briefing Mr Major for Prime Minister’s Questions and throughout his victorious general election campaign, when Norman Lamont, then Chancellor of the Exchequer and now Lord Lamont of Lerwick, spotted him.

“I thought, that’s someone I want working for me; he was very quick, and very well informed,” Lord Lamont said.

But when the economy went into freefall, Lamont left the Treasury. His protégé left to work for Carlton Television, “the brightest man we ever employed”, Michael Green, Carlton’s former boss, said.

These were difficult years, in which he stood to be an MP and lost, but it was when the golden boy grew up. His feisty new wife, Samantha, made sure he rejected all trace of Tory boy, “appealing to his better nature” on all social issues.

Then, two years after he was elected to the safe Oxfordshire seat of Witney in 2001, his son Ivan was born with Ohtahara syndrome. He suffers from severe epilepsy and cerebral palsy, will probably never walk or talk, and is often taken to hospital with life-threatening illnesses. Some believe this is where Cameron gets his unflappability — when, like him, you spent five days of the election campaign in hospital with your desperately ill child, it puts the more petty side of politics into perspective.

It also shows why politics matters and why, given his highly effective role as Shadow Minister for the Disabled, most expect a similarly impassioned stance from him as Shadow Education Secretary.

How will he do in the coming leadership battle? The trouble is, “David” is the Cameron who has the ambition to stand, whereas “Dave” is the man who could win.

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