The week that revealed the truth about Britain and class
Forget the pig. The most telling message of our bombshell Cameron series is that – despite Thatcher and Major’s ‘classless society’ – birth, privilege (and Eton) have never mattered more
THERE is an odd quirk of history which means many of our political leaders end up being associated with a particular prop. It is hard now, for example, to picture Neville Chamberlain without his umbrella, which came to symbolise his insularity and peevishness. We remember Harold Wilson for his pipe, which was really just a public relations gimmick, since he actually smoked cigars. And we always associate Michael Foot with his infamous donkey jacket, even though it was in truth an expensive overcoat from Harrods.
Our current Prime Minister must be praying that the public are in a forgetful mood. For after the Mail’s serialisation of Lord Ashcroft’s explosive biography, there is at least a decent chance that David Cameron will forever be associated with a dead pig’s head.
Whether the Prime Minister really did molest his porcine accessory as part of an Oxford initiation ritual we shall, I suspect, never know.
The reason the story has stirred up such a national furore is not just that i t sounds so bizarrely l urid, but that it seems, to many people, to capture a deeper truth about British politics today.
Forget, if you can, the stuff about the pig. Indeed, the pig is largely irrelevant. The real point of the story, after all, is the fact that the Prime Minister once moved — and indeed still moves — in a rarefied world of almost unimaginable privilege, a world of exclusive student societies and Oxford dining clubs, surrounded by old school friends and cut-glass cronies.
Indeed, I think the abiding impact of Lord Ashcroft’s biography is that it lays bare, in often excruciating detail, the extraordinary advantages of the Prime Minister’s social background — a background that will strike most ordinary Britons as utterly fantastical in its sheer wealth and privilege.
As is now well known, Lord Ashcroft, having donated £ 8 million to the Conservative Party, was furious that Mr Cameron did not keep to his promise to give the billionaire a ministerial position in his new administration.
In some ways, I think it is rather heartening that a plutocrat, based in Belize for tax reasons, cannot buy his way into the heart of the British Establishment.
BUT THERE is also something irresistibly fascinating about the spectacle of a selfmade man like Lord Ashcroft, who went to his local grammar school, seething with resentment against a patrician Prime Minister who moved smoothly into Downing Street from Eton and Oxford.
Indeed, what struck me most about Lord Ashcroft’s book was not the stuff about Mr Cameron’s university excesses, but the almost incredible details about his gilded boyhood at a Berkshire prep school.
We were told that his aristocratic cl assmates’ parents included ‘eight Honourables, four Sirs, two Majors, two Princesses, two Marchionesses, one Viscount, one Brigadier, one Commodore, one Earl, one Lord ... and the Queen’. And we were regaled with the story of how young Master Cameron enjoyed his 11-year- old school friend’s birthday party — on Concorde.
It would, I think, be unduly mean- spirited to hold all this against the Prime Minister.
He cannot help his background any more than a miner’s son from Barnsley can help being a miner’s son from Barnsley. Nor do I think he should be ashamed of his good fortune in being born into such affluence and privilege.
All the same, future historians will, I suspect, be astonished by the fact that in the second decade of the 21st century, Britain — a supposedly diverse, dynamic and meritocratic society — was led by a man who was sent to boarding school at the age of seven and later, at Oxford, joined the Bullingdon club, which required him to spend the equivalent of £1,200 on a special tailcoat.
Indeed, what makes the book’s allegations so resonant is that they reinforce the stereotype of an Old Etonian toff, the embodiment of wealth and privilege, governing a nation afflicted by deep social and economic inequality.
This is, of course, a caricature. But it is one deeply rooted in many ordinary people’s minds, and like so many caricatures, it contains more than a grain of truth.
Is it a coincidence, for example, that the current chairman of the Conservative Party, Lord Feldman, used to play tennis with Mr Cameron at Oxford? Or that the PM’s closest advisers include Oliver Letwin, Jo Johnson and Ed Llewellyn, who all went to Eton? You would have to have been born yesterday to think so.
To some extent, Mr Cameron’s defenders would be right to argue that this is nothing new. He is, after all, the 19th Old Etonian to have become Prime Minister. Seven of our former PMs went to Harrow, and six to Westminster. By comparison, only eight were educated at state schools.
Given this record, Mr Cameron might be f or given f or assuming that he was born to rule. Indeed, perhaps that explains his polished selfconfidence, which distinguishes him from state-educated predecessors such as John Major and Gordon Brown, who never seemed quite comfortable wearing the mantle of power.
As for Mr Cameron’s shameless use of patronage to reward his old friends, that, too, is nothing new. His political hero, the One Nation Tory paternalist Harold Macmillan, stuffed his government with no fewer than 35 Old Etonians in the late Fifties.
Indeed, Macmillan, himself an ‘OE’, appointed so many of his own aristocratic relatives to government posts that the Duke of Devonshire — who served as his Minister for Commonwealth Relations, and just happened to be his nephew — openly joked