Dave and Boris, still fighting on the battlefields of Eton
It’s the man who won the glittering prizes at school versus the classmate who won the biggest prize of all
One day, someone will write a book about David Cameron and Boris Johnson. The problem will be that if it’s accurate, no one will believe it. After all, the international standing of a great nation hanging on the complicated and not entirely mature relationship between two men from the same school and university dining club is the stuff of cliched fiction, not historical reality.
To listen to each man talk about the other is to be in no doubt that theirs is an intense personal rivalry, and yet also something else, rather more familiar and even affectionate than the typical political duel. They may be competing on the national and even global stage to show who is best, but you get the impression the audience they are playing to, the judges whose verdicts they crave are an altogether smaller group: members of the extended family of privilege and posterity that both decided to join when they were boys at Eton College.
Ah, Eton. Many of the analyses of both men that mention their school do so without insight, overlooking the fact that most voters don’t care about their schooling anywhere near as much as the pundits do. But as people who know them well can tell you, they themselves care, these two Etonians. They care very much.
Mr Johnson is a little older than Mr Cameron. At school, he was a star, a scholar and a prefect, over-talented and over-confident in a place that prides itself on producing boys with unrivalled amounts of both. Mr Cameron, by contrast, was relatively ordinary, by the standards of the place, at least: no scholarship, no prefect’s waistcoat. Only one of them talked of one day being “World King” and only one was seriously regarded by contemporaries as a future leader. And it wasn’t the one who is now PM.
Imagine how that plays out now. Mr Cameron beat the star of stars to the top prize, yet Mr Johnson has never seemed to acknowledge that victory, much less respect it. He can rarely resist the chance to tweak the tail of the man he sometimes describes as “Cameron Minor”, a little chap from one of the lower forms.
His sister, Rachel, is even more overt in expressing Clan Johnson’s militant lack of deference to Mr Cameron. A couple of years ago in a BBC interview she put it thus: “When they’re together it’s rather sweet, because David Cameron, even though he’s taller, looks at Boris as if he’s still head boy at Eton.
Remember, Mr Cameron was two years younger – the “young pup”. Asked whether Mr Johnson was now resentful as Mr Cameron had become Prime Minister, she said: “No, it gives Boris a sense of continuing superiority because he was Captain of the School.” That attitude was vividly displayed last week when Boris shambled into No 10 to hear Mr Cameron’s case for staying in the EU, before sauntering out declaring: “No deal.”
At the very least, he sees this as a negotiation between equals, if not a chance for the young pup to win the favour of the head boy.
Of course, this doesn’t trouble Mr Cameron much. Even if he wasn’t Prime Minister, wasn’t the most successful Conservative of his generation, the dominant politician of the day, he would still be the most confident, most self-assured man you will ever meet. That is just who he is.
Some people think Boris tries so hard to take the glittering prizes because as the quarter-Turkish child of a eurocrat and an artist, he never quite felt accepted by the British establishment, and he does indeed stand slightly apart from the rest of the ruling class. Not David Cameron, though. No such doubts or insecurity for him. He was born to this life, has nothing to prove. He belongs. No one and nothing can challenge that.
But still, he wouldn’t be human if he did not feel a tiny niggle about Boris and his antics — irritation sometimes expressed directly in text messages to the mayor. Here he was, a prime minister at the peak of his powers making his genuinely historic gambit over Europe and all anyone wanted to know was if Mr Johnson was going to deign to back him or not.
Rightly so, too. Never mind all the fuss about the policy details. Personality matters here rather more, or at least two personalities. Mr Cameron is the Remain camp’s biggest asset, his endorsement mattering more than the package being endorsed. But the advantage he gives could be all but cancelled out by the call from “Boris for Britain” to Leave. Imagine how Mr Cameron feels about the prospect of Mr Johnson deciding the outcome of his European gamble – and thus, the manner in which his premiership ends.
As for Mr Johnson, imagine being the cleverest of the clever, the brightest of the bright, someone extraordinary, and seeing the greatest jewel pocketed by someone, well, ordinary. That is an awfully big itch to go unscratched for so long.
The best way to understand Boris and Dave is a story they both tell in private. It is about a meeting in No 10 on some minor aspect of the London budget. Dave wants to minimise his spending; Boris to get the most cash he can. The PM has a briefing paper that reveals the most he is prepared to give Boris. Boris wants to see it. The PM refuses. Boris tries to grab it. The PM snatches it away.
The Prime Minister and the Mayor of London end up wrestling on the floor trying to seize the paper.
And the vital detail is that each man tells the story that he got the paper. Even in a slightly juvenile squabble, they both want people to know that they won over the other.
Of course, that story offers simplicity. Politics is rarely so clear: who’s winning between Dave and Boris today? The man with the big job or the man with the first-name popularity?
Well, we are fast approaching what could finally be a moment of clarity. Europe may well decide the duel between Cameron Minor and the World King once and for all. The man who leads the winning campaign in the referendum will not just secure his place in British history, he will claim a much more personal – and quite possibly more valuable – victory too.
‘Politics is rarely so clear: who’s winning, the man with the big job or the man with first-name popularity?’