Call Me Dave

The Unauthorised Biography of David Cameron

Michael Ashcroft and Isabel Oakeshott (Biteback, 608pp, £20, Oldie price £16.50) THIS AUTUMN has seen two biographies of our prime minister come along at once. Cameron at 10 was written with Downing Street’s co-operation and confines itself to Cameron’s first term as prime minister, while Call Me

Dave, a renegade operation, is a more conventional biography covering its subject’s entire life. ‘While each section of Cameron at 10 is filled with analysis,’ explained Charlotte Henry in the

Independent, ‘its non-linear nature gives a reduced sense of a narrative arc, of Cameron’s premiership developing over time. However, the authors do manage to tie together the moments that will define his legacy.’ On the other hand,

Call Me Dave is ‘much more successful in portraying Cameron’s development as an individual, as it runs from childhood to Downing Street, and there are some fascinating anecdotes’. Nonetheless, ‘much of the early-years reporting, while humorous, seems entirely ephemeral to our perception of Cameron the PM’. Although Call Me Dave ‘should by no means be simply dismissed, ultimately the offering from Seldon and Snowdon feels a far more substantial look at an intriguing political leader’.

Former Labour MP Chris Mullin, reviewing the two books for the Observer, was even-handed in his judgement. The Seldon–snowdon book is ‘a substantial piece of work — a blow-by-blow account, impeccably researched and carefully documented, of the highs and lows of the first Cameron administration’. Its ‘judgements are on the whole balanced and the narrative compelling’. Despite the lurid serialisation of Call Me Dave in the Daily Mail, which indicated that Ashcroft was out for revenge, Mullin concluded that ‘remarkably, and despite the nonsense about a pig’s head, this is a biography almost entirely free of malice. Indeed, apart from a brief introduction and a lengthy appendix summarising the conclusions of his regular opinion polls, which he publishes on his own website, Lord Ashcroft’s fingerprints are largely absent.’ With regard to Cameron’s Oxford years, ‘there is much talk of drugs, but no smoking gun’.

‘Remarkably, and despite the nonsense about a pig’s head, this is a biography almost entirely free of malice’

For the Independent on Sunday’s political commentator John Rentoul,

Call Me Dave contains many ‘lurid and seemingly implausible stories, often described as untrue or unverifiable by the authors and yet included regardless. I have never seen anything like it in a book purporting to be a serious account of an important political leader’s life.’ Yet the more he read it, the better he ‘thought it reflected on the prime minister. To have ditched Ashcroft suggests sound judgement, and to have done so with such light collateral damage required some political skill.’ While

Cameron at 10 is ‘a serious work of ultra-contemporary history, historians will notice Ashcroft’s book only as an example of how Cameron extricated himself from an entanglement that could have caused much more trouble than it did’. The ‘abiding impression’ left on

Daily Telegraph reviewer Robert Colville by Cameron at 10 was ‘of the headmaster that Seldon used to be peering over his spectacles at the pupil before him as he leafs through each report’. It will ‘probably be read out of duty rather than for pleasure’ since ‘there is none of the journalistic eye for gossip found in Matthew d’ancona’s In

It Together, nor the verbal flair’. David Aaronovitch in the Times was equally appalled by the ‘penny dreadful writing’ of Call Me Dave, which he described as an attempted murder of its subject’s reputation, albeit ‘murder by trainspotters’. The ‘main murder weapon turns out to be faint praise. Every good thing he’s done was someone else’s idea, every bad thing was his own fault.’ Ashcroft and Oakeshott ‘are detained entirely on the surface of his existence and fail to excavate, in any proper or interesting way, into the psychology of the man himself’.