CAMERON CONFIDENTIAL
Parents at his prep school included: 8 Honourables, 4 Sirs, 2 Princesses, 2 Marchionesses, 1 Viscount, 1 Earl, 1 Lord . . . and Her Majesty the Queen!
FOR DAVID CAMERON’S classmates at prep school, birthdays were sometimes marked with considerably more than a cake, a hired conjurer and a party bag containing sweets and a novelty pencil. At the age of 11, the future Prime Minister was treated to a celebration that must rank as one of the most lavish childhood parties in recent history. It kicked off with a flight on Concorde, spanned several American states and included a helicopter flight. While a pupil at an exclusive prep school called Heatherdown, he was one of four boys to be invited on the all-expenses-paid jaunt to celebrate the birthday of his classmate, Peter — grandson of oil billionaire John Paul Getty,
Accompanying them was an 18-year- old teacher called Rhidian Llewellyn, who has never forgotten the excesses of Getty’s birthday celebrations. Aboard Concorde, the boys tucked into caviar, salmon and beef bordelaise. And when Llewellyn turned round to check his charges were behaving, he was met with the sight of Cameron cheerily raising a glass of Dom Pérignon ’69 and exclaiming: ‘Good health, sir!’
The boys spent four days in Washington DC, sightseeing by airconditioned convertible and dining in fine restaurants, before flying on to New York, where they explored the Empire State Building and World Trade Centre.
Llewellyn says: ‘I had to vaguely try to control this group of five ten and 11-year- old boys. Fortunately, the Getty boy had a French nanny, so between us we just about coped.’
After New York, the boys went to Disney World in Florida and the Kennedy Space Centre, before heading to Las Vegas, where they hung around the hotel swimming pool and played the slot machines.
The ‘ birthday’ concluded with three days at the Grand Canyon and a trip to Hollywood, followed by a week of relaxation at the Getty family home, which overlooked San Francisco’s Golden Gate.
While he was at Heatherdown, the parents of the pupils included eight Honourables, four Sirs, two Majors, two Princesses, two Marchionesses, one Viscount, one Brigadier, one Commodore, one Earl, one Lord . . . and the Queen.
At aged nine, Cameron played Harold Rabbit in a school production of The Wind In The Willows, opposite Prince Edward, who was Mole. Watching in the audience was Her Majesty.
By his own admission, David Cameron had an extremely comfortable start in life. A Cabinet colleague once teased that he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth — and Cameron replied: ‘No, I was born with two.’
His parents’ millions were both inherited and self-made. Though the Camerons are not blue bloods, there are titles and big houses in the background.
Home was a rectory in Peasemore, a village near Newbury, Berkshire. It is a Grade II-listed building with a tennis court, swimming pool and extensive grounds. There is also an elaborate pagoda, built by Cameron’s father, which his friends called ‘Ian’s erection’.
His upbringing was quintessentially English. One childhood friend, who spent many happy summers lounging by the pool with him and his three siblings, loved the oldfashioned wholesomeness of it all.
‘To me it was like a fairy tale; like living in an Enid Blyton book. His mother would come out to the pool with jugs of homemade lemonade. It was just idyllic.’
Another playmate says: ‘ He is a real, proper Englishman, who’d love to defend what he sees as the real England — but his real England is different to almost everyone else’s.’
To some of Cameron’s childhood friends, his parents Ian and Mary seemed kind but a little remote. They recall the children greeting their father rather formally when he came home from work.
‘His mother Mary was quite frightening to me because she was so grand and proper,’ says one. ‘She was quite abrupt with children. They were all close, but I never saw any signs of affection — hugging and kissing and that kind of stuff.’
There was, of course, a nanny: Gwen Hoare, now 94, who still lives in the village. Her brother Bert says she has worked for several generations of the family — ‘She brought up the Camerons,’ he adds simply.
DAVID CAMERON was close to both parents but worshipped his father, a stockbroker, who had been born with deformed legs. By all accounts, Ian was an extrovert who never let his disability hold him back.
As well as helping to weed the churchyard and serving on the parish council, he was very successful. Ironically, given the political sensitivities surrounding tax avoidance today, his area of expertise was offshore investment funds.
He set three rules for his children: that they should realise nothing in life is ever completely fair; that they shouldn’t marry until they were at least 26; and that they should never become chartered accountants.
Mary sat as a magistrate in Newbury, where she developed a reputation for being tough. ‘I used to come home, to almost warn the children about the perils of doing the wrong thing, and [David] learned quite a lot from that,’ she once said, adding that she ‘wasn’t always successful’.
Tory MP Nicholas Soames, a family friend, describes the Camerons as ‘very, very good people’, with a strong sense of civic duty. ‘They really do their whack, always did. Everyone who knows [David’s] mother loves her,’ he says.
Before he turned eight, Cameron was shipped off to boarding school near Ascot. The school, set in a 30acre estate, had some arcane rituals. After breakfast, pupils had to troop off to the loos, where they were made to recite Latin verbs and then tick their names off on a list pinned to each cubicle door.
There was still corporal punishment: Cameron was apparently beaten a couple of times with a hair- brush — once for stealing strawberries from the garden of the headmaster’s wife. And, at weekends, Heatherdown boys, clad in green boiler suits, were allowed to roam the grounds, shooting air rifles.
As the younger sibling of an older pupil, the future Prime Minister was known as ‘Cameron Minor’, shortened to ‘Cameron Mi’; while his brother Alex — remembered by former teachers as the more extrovert and popular of the two — was known as ‘Cameron Ma’.
According to former teacher Christopher Bromley-Martin, Cameron Mi was ‘tidy’ and ‘a sort of miniature example of what he is now — he hasn’t changed in appearance at all, except in an obvious sort of way.’
He did well academically, despite never being regarded as bright enough to sit the ‘ murderous’ scholarship exam for Eton. But he did get into the school in 1979.
The education he received there, and the connections he made, were instrumental in his ascent and have coloured his political career. The friends he made at Eton have provided him with a remarkably stable and loyal social base.
Throughout the school, there was intense pressure to perform. It was ruthlessly academic, though Cameron was never one of the highfliers. One boy, who followed him to
As a teen, he dined so often at the smart Etoile restaurant that he could recite the menu
Oxford, says: ‘I was amazed when people would come up to me and say: “You went to Eton, so you must know David. He’s really clever.”
‘I thought . . . what?! He clearly absolutely shone at Oxford, but I think most people at school with him would have been surprised that he was academically top notch.’
Although Cameron coasted through much of his time at Eton, he suddenly started studying hard in the sixth form. The late Michael Kidson, Cameron’s sixth form history teacher, used to say in later life that his success at A-level was ‘among the most inexplicable events in modern history’.
As a teenager, Cameron was remarkably sophisticated. During one three-day break, he told friends, he’d flown to Florence to immerse himself in art. He also dined so often at the Etoile restaurant in Soho he could recite the menu by heart.
It is a testament to Cameron that few Old Etonians have anything seriously disobliging to say about him. Some thought him a little arrogant and charmless, but his worst social offence seems to have been to stick to a small clique — a habit that remains.
One former classmate said: ‘He didn’t make friends easily and seemed to cling on to very close friends. Looking back, I sort of read that as maybe he was slightly insecure, possibly even a bit shy.’
James Deen, who was in all the same classes as Cameron, says: ‘He was a very nice person at the periphery of a group of quite naughty boys.’
William Buckland, who shared history classes with him says: ‘By Eton standards . . . [David] was “good second- rate” in terms of talent.’
When, at the tender age of 14, he told friends he would one day be Prime Minister, they did not take it seriously. By his mid-20s, when he was flying high at Tory Central Office, it was becoming very clear that they had underestimated him.