DOES PM BELIEVE IN ANYTHING?
Chillaxing on endless hols. Low-brow box sets. But the question vexing colleagues . . .
WHAT was the point of David Cameron? That was the question many were asking a year into the life of the Coalition. For all the talk of tackling the deficit and creating a ‘Big Society’, voters remained confused about his purpose.
Such was the uncertainty that Andrew Cooper, Cameron’s pollster, carried out a survey on what people thought ‘ the ideal Government’ would aim to do. ‘People think we just don’t get it,’ he warned. ‘The public mood is turning against us.’
The old mantra — ‘we’re all in it together’ — a soundbite that used to poll positively, was becoming a source of scorn. ‘People just laugh when we use that phrase now,’ Cooper said. ‘Most people still don’t know what the Government is trying to do beyond making cuts. They don’t know what your vision is.’
Cameron himself seemed unclear. Asked on the Today programme whether he was still a ‘ modern, compassionate Conservative’, he demurred. ‘ I’m a common- sense Conservative,’ he replied uncertainly. It was so anodyne as to be meaningless.
Within the party, a feeling was emerging that, having got the top job, Cameron had achieved all he wanted. ‘ Seventy-five per cent of him wanted to be PM, and 25 per cent of him wanted to change the world,’ sighs a Tory grandee. ‘ With Thatcher and Brown, it was the other way round.’
Another source, who likes Cameron, nonetheless thinks he’s ‘in politics to be in politics’. ‘It’s a stimulating hobby for him. The phrase that Osborne uses, which I really dislike, is: “Oh look, it’s all a game.” He’s said that to me lots of times. I don’t think it is a game. It’s a serious endeavour for the future of the country.’
A former Cabinet minister says: ‘My admiration for Cameron as a tactician is almost boundless, but what’s the big picture? What’s the intention? I just don’t know what makes this man tick. It’s almost as if anything outside his family is just an exercise yard for his political skills.
‘It’s as if it’s just a game of chess, and he just wants to come top.’
One strategist close to the leadership wonders what Cameron would have done if ‘fate hadn’t happened to hand him the task of dealing with the deficit’. ‘I don’t know, and I suspect he doesn’t either,’ he says.
A well-known think-tank type, who worked with Cameron when he first became leader, said: ‘There’s nothing there! He’s just a decent guy who’s on his back, floating. not struggling. not going anywhere.
‘You have to respect his talents — he’s good in public, good at the repartee; he’s got a good memory for detail. But there’s no guiding philosophy. You have to be able to build a philosophy. That’s why Blairism succeeded. That’s why Thatcherism succeeded. What is Cameronism? F*** all!
‘He’s like an MRI scanner who can see the tumours, but doesn’t know how to get them out. It’s really sad. It’s rare to find somebody who can grasp big narrative issues and problems as he does.
‘Yet he’s asleep at the wheel when he knows the road is dangerous.’ The impression that Cameron did not ‘stand for anything’ was fuelled by the pragmatism that enabled him to lead a coalition with a rival party in the first place. even behind closed doors, he rarely seemed exercised by any single issue. (A confidant says the most animated he ever saw him was ‘in his dislike for [Speaker] John Bercow’.)
The most damning assessment came from Michael Gove’s former special adviser Dominic Cummings, who publicly labelled him a ‘sphinx without a riddle’. ‘ Cameron requires no psychological analysis,’ Cummings wrote. ‘He’s one of the most straightforward people one will meet in politics. Pundits have wasted millions of words on what they regard as his “mystery” but he is exactly what he seems . . .
‘He’s cleverer than most MPs and can hold his own in conversations with senior officials . . . Cameron is superficially suitable for the job in the way that “experts” often judge such things — basic chimp politics skills, height, glibness etc, so we can “shove him out to give a statement on X”. That’s it.’
As early as October 2010, critics had begun depicting Cameron as ‘the essay-crisis Prime Minister’ — like a student who leaves his work until the last minute.
By the middle of 2012, the phrase had acquired real traction.
As his old Oxford friend James Delingpole puts it: ‘every time you think it’s all going to come crashing on top of him, he stays up all night on his Red Bull and Pro Plus, and dashes off something just good enough to persuade the world that the moment to send him down has not arrived quite just yet.’
At Westminster, a damning new phrase to describe his propensity to put his feet up began circulating: ‘chillaxing’ — a contraction of ‘chill-out’ and ‘relax’. ‘If there was an Olympic gold medal for “chillaxing” [Cameron] would win it,’ someone told his biographers Francis elliott and James Hanning.
Friends weighed in, testifying to the PM’s fondness for country weekends, tennis, snooker, cooking, gardening and watching TV. He was even reported to have hosted karaoke nights at Chequers.
no 10 was furious with the allegation: it struck a nerve. Cameron is indeed fond of laying back and watching a DVD box set with a large glass of wine.
His cultural tastes are mainstream and low brow: TV shows with ‘ murder, mystery and suspense’ (he named Trial And Retribution; Midsomer Murders; He Kills Coppers); American series such as The West Wing, Game Of Thrones and Desperate House-
wives (which he ‘loved’); and, in the car, Virgin (now Absolute) Radio. According to Samantha, he likes to watch ‘all three Godfather movies again and again and again’. And he annoys her with his endless channel flicking.
He went to see the crude Sacha Baron Cohen movie Borat and laughed throughout, and admitted he liked playing Fruit Ninja on his iPad.
He has made much of going on midweek ‘date nights’ with Samantha. A friend says he takes his music ‘very seriously’ and has more than 27,000 tracks on his computer.
Yet he was insulted by the suggestion that any of this made him a slacker. Such was the concern in No 10 that Andrew Cooper carried out private polling to see whether the ‘chillax’ label was sticking.
The results were encouraging — most voters believed he worked hard enough — yet the term refused to go away.
Part of the problem was his conspicuous number of holidays, a feature of his leadership.
Again and again, he would be holidaying when some crisis or other struck. By August 2014, when ISIS was rampaging across Iraq and a British terror suspect beheaded a U. S. journalist, Cameron had clocked up 14 breaks in just over three years, in Granada, Ibiza, Tuscany, Mallorca, Ibiza, the Algarve, Jura, Lanzarote and Portugal, and taking no fewer than five trips to Cornwall.
‘At the moment, it seems like the only way to ask him a question is to hire a Cornish icecream van and set up on the beach,’ one MP lamented.
Yet he has always been honest about his taste for downtime.
He told GQ Editor Dylan Jones in 2007 that it was one of ‘Sam’s rules’ that ‘we have plenty of time together, plenty of time with the children’.
‘I think you need to do that in a highpressure job . . . If you work so hard that you get completely fried in the head, and totally ragged, you start making bad decisions and bad judgments,’ he has said. ‘So holidays are very important to me, to relax a bit, and then get the batteries charged up for what lies ahead.’
But his attitude frustrates some colleagues. One who travelled with him regularly was struck by his reluctance to let his workload get in the way.
‘We were staying in the middle of nowhere in a crappy B&B, with a helpyourself booze cupboard, and he said: “I’ve got lots of papers to do. Let’s have a chill.” He’d have all these papers and yet he’d say: “Let’s have another one.” He always used to talk about nights off and I just thought he was a bit lazy.
‘I felt bad for the women in the office. There was all this talk about how he had to get home for family time, but the women in the office weren’t going home for family time.
‘I thought it was really naughty. It was a disingenuous way of saying: “I’m actually bunking off home.” ’ The same aide was surprised and irritated when Cameron ‘whipped out a novel’ en route to a public engagement.
‘We’d gone to Gloucester — there were about six or seven of us — and he sat among everyone reading it,’ he recalls. ‘Everyone sat there in deferential silence, but I remember thinking: “I’m really sorry, but the spin doctor in me thinks you should be reading some papers and looking like you’ve got work to do.”
‘Sitting with seven staff and reading a novel? I found that quite irritating.’
Another former aide has never forgotten his willingness to deliver a keynote speech he knew was not up to scratch.
‘His fingernails are not bitten down,’ he sighs. ‘I remember him going to bed the night before one party conference speech and saying: “It’s not that good, but it will do.” ’
There is something disquieting about Cameron’s willingness to settle for second best. Literally and figuratively, he sleeps easily, whatever is going on in the world. (‘ Pillow, head, bang,’ is how Bruce Anderson describes his ability to drop off.)
Yet he is supremely capable in carrying out the job of Prime Minister as he understands it. Unlike Gordon Brown ( once described as an ‘ insomniac obsessive’), he sees no reason to kill himself in the process.