Cameron’s school pals don’t recall maggots on the menu!

He has accused his one- time friend Michael Gove of becoming an ‘ambassador for the post-truth age’, but is David Cameron’s own grasp on reality all that it could be?

I ask because his claims about heatherdown, the prep school he attended in ascot, have caused dismay and anger among his fellow Old heatherdonians — who include Prince edward, the Duke of Bedford and innumerable other aristocrats — who dismiss Cameron’s description as ‘ridiculous’.

‘ I was horrified by what he wrote,’ one of them, who was at heatherdown and eton with the former PM, tells me.

‘You did not have to line up naked outside the baths; you went to the bathroom in your dressing gown.

‘Nor did James edwards [the headmaster] blow a whistle to order boys out of the baths. It’s just not true.’

But it is Cameron’s recollection that the food was ‘spartan’ and ‘one meal consisted of curry, rice — and maggots’ which causes most anger. This hideous sounding combination was, according to his For The Record memoir, one of the reasons that he lost ‘a stone in weight during a single term’.

‘That’s just rubbish,’ continues the contemporary. ‘ There were no maggots — if there had been, he would have lost a stone every term. You were fed properly. heatherdown was considered — relative to other prep schools at the time — pretty cushy,’ adds the heatherdonian.

‘There was even a separate building called heatherlea for the 12 most junior boys, who were looked after by Rachel Gibson, who lived there.’

Rhidian Llewellyn, a former master at the school, agrees. ‘I taught there while David was there, and I don’t remember anything like that,’ he tells me.

Indeed, Llewellyn, once a pupil at heatherdown himself, recalls that the school had enviable culinary standards. ‘The cook was called Norman and his cheese soufflés for staff supper were not to be missed,’ he reflects, though conceding that ‘Thursday evenings were a bit ropey for the boys’.

This, he explains, was because it was ‘Norman’s day off and they had to make do with Weetabix’.

henry Combe, an incensed Old heatherdonian of a more senior vintage, says there is no evidence that the school regime dented Cameron’s confidence.

‘even as a small boy he boasted that, one day, he was going to be prime minister,’ he tells me, explaining that this is the memory of ‘an exact contemporary of Cameron’.

a spokesman for Mr Cameron says that, while his memoirs are ‘not a historical diary’, he stands by what he has written.