Fixer who ran Sam Cam’s life ... and didn’t care who she offended
WHEN David and Samantha Cameron said their farewells in Downing Street, a small group of aides looked on. One was wearing a flowing flowery dress, which guaranteed she stood out from the crowd. This was Isabel Spearman, who had spent most of the previous five years in charge of Mrs Cameron’s daily routine.
There was no job too big or small – from arranging the minutiae of her diary, to suitcase-packing, selecting the right outfit for a particular event and advising on her hair. There were also baby-sitting duties.
However, she was said to be imperious and high-handed with officials – and even MPs – who she suspected of trying to get too close to either the Prime Minister or his wife.
This made Spearman deeply unpopular outside the Cameron’s close-knit inner circle. Spearman actually left her job in No10 last year, but stayed friends with the Camerons and volunteered to help organise their tearful post-Brexit departure from Downing Street. She was living up to her own self-styled motto: ‘I will fix it.’
In return, Cameron has now tried to fix it for Spearman, 37, by recommending her for an OBE in his resignation honours list. Not surprisingly, this has caused widespread disdain. An OBE for Sam Cam’s bag carrier, hairdresser and stylist?
‘She was a glorified message-taker and make-up artist. Why on earth does that warrant her being given such a senior honour?’ said one senior Tory last night.
One cynical theory is that the initiative came from Mrs Cameron who, having left No10, is keen to launch her own fashion label, possibly with Spearman.
‘The title “OBE” would look good on the company’s headed paper,’ it has been suggested by a disaffected Tory.
For her part, since she left Downing Street, Spearman has worked as a brand and image consultant.
How ironic, therefore, that her own image has suffered as a result of these accusations of cronyism. In addition, matters have not been helped by a disastrous business venture involving her husband Mark Crocker, the stepson of the late Lord Oaksey, doyen of the horse racing world.
He was a director of a beauty products firm launched by the socialite Jemma Kidd, which collapsed in 2012 with debts of £2million and was wound up. One of the other five directors was Ghislaine Maxwell, the daughter of the corrupt newspaper publisher Robert Maxwell who drowned after falling from his yacht (named The Lady Ghislaine) amid allegations that he had stolen hundreds of millions of pounds from the pension fund of the Daily Mirror, which he owned.
Last year, Ghislaine Maxwell was forced to deny lurid claims that she had recruited young girls as sex slaves for her one-time lover, the billionaire financier and convicted paedophile Jeffrey epstein, who was a friend of Prince Andrew.
Like so many of the Camerons’ friends, Spearman had a privileged background.
She was born in 1979, the year Margaret Thatcher came to power, to strong Tory stock and was brought up in Perthshire.
Her father, Lochain, is a farmer and company director.
Her Spanish mother, Pilin, is the sister-in-law of Lord Garel Jones, the former Conservative minister who was seen as a key plotter in the political assassination of Mrs Thatcher.
Her grandfather, Sir Alexander Cadwallader Spearman, was a Conservative MP and her eton- educated younger brother is married to a member of the now defunct Brazilian royal family.
With such a pedigree, it is not surprising that Tatler magazine once put her top of its Little Black Book of the country’s most eligible singletons.
Spearman became a leading member of the so- called Notting Hill set of Tories, the clique of pub- lic school-educated friends united by a conviction that they were born to rule. She was introduced to them after working for the luxury handbag designer Anya Hindmarch, who is one of Samantha Cameron’s closest friends.
She was also close to Flora and William Astor, Mrs Cameron’s stepbrother and sister.
Her bonds with the Camerons strengthened when Spearman got a job with Mrs Cameron’s mother, Lady Astor, at her upmarket furniture company Oka.
Lady Astor then began lending her to her daughter as a wardrobe assistant for two days a week when the Tories were in Opposition.
In 2010, when the Camerons moved into Downing Street, she was taken on as a ‘special adviser’, with her £60,000 salary paid for by the taxpayer with one day a week funded by the Conservative Party.
In charge of Mrs Cameron’s diary, she helped put together her outfits and organise charity events. She had a desk in No12 Downing Street but operated mostly from the neighbouring flat, which was the Camerons’ home and where she helped to baby- sit the couple’s young children.
Often attending meetings with the Prime Minister’s team to ensure that the couple’s diaries never clashed, Spearman (known as Bells, a diminutive of her first name) was said to know more about the PM’s life than any of his political confidantes and was as determined as a lioness to keep it that way.
A senior Tory who dealt with Cameron’s office regularly said: ‘Isabel had a great knack of making sure that other people never got too close. She could be ice-cold.’
Spearman acted as a buffer between Mrs Cameron and Andy Coulson, the no-nonsense No10 communications director who quit and was jailed for his role in the phone-hacking scandal when he was in his previous job as editor of the News of the World. Before Spearman arrived, Coulson occasionally clashed with Mrs Cameron because he wanted her to do more high profile appearances.
In 2013, he wrote in GQ magazine: ‘The time has now come for Sam to play a more public role and take some risks ... She should now be persuaded that the 2015 campaign is already under way and she’s badly needed in the trenches.’
Such was the power of the woman whose tasks included ensuring that Sam Cameron’s belt matched her shoes and that her hair flicked in the right direction. Last night, as the chumocracy row raged over David Cameron’s honours list, one grumpy Tory grandee compared the nomination for an OBE for the stylist behind his clothes horse wife with the famous story about the mad Roman emperor Caligula, who was said to have been so enamoured with horse, that he intended to appoint him a consul.
An unfair jibe, but it certainly reflects the anger about how the former Prime Minister’s inner circle have been put forward for baubles.