Cameron the misunderstood
Forget Eton and the Piers Gaveston: the PM’S shameless use of patronage to strengthen his power is far more important, says ANDREW GIMSON
DAVID CAMERON is an amazingly oldfashioned Prime Minister, but not in the way our class-obsessed pundits suppose. The typical pundit went to a fee-paying school, but a less famous one than Eton, and to Oxford, but was not elected to the Bullingdon. The hard-working columnist overlooks his or her own privileged start in life, and suffers from a suppressed sense of unfairness, even of rejection. Are not his or her gifts as worthy of recognition as Cameron’s? The pundit would like to get even with the Prime Minister. And what more satisfying way to do this than by turning Eton and the Bullingdon into Cameron’s mortal weaknesses?
So the suggestion is put about that Eton cuts one off from ordinary people. No matter that Gladstone, George Orwell and Harold Macmillan (in his Supermac period) all managed, despite having been to Eton, to develop a rapport with the wider public. No matter that the school itself, like any successful institution, is so keen to adapt to changing times that it is, if anything, better at fitting in with modern life than some of its rivals.
The suggestion is likewise put about that the Bullingdon is for monsters in human form, who deserve to be barred forever from public life, and have only by some incomprehensible accident attained high office (Cameron, George Osborne, Boris Johnson; in Poland, Radek Sikorski). In a recent variant of this attack, Cameron is supposed to have engaged in a swinish initiation ceremony at a meeting of the Piers Gaveston Society. This is the kind of uncouth story which ambitious Oxonians enjoyed making up about each other in the mid-1980s, a period I looked at when writing a book about Boris.
These misapprehensions, though tiresome, are also quite useful to Cameron, for they lead his opponents to underestimate him: see their forecasts of how he would do in the general election. His professionalism is discounted. It was developed after Oxford, in the less glamorous setting of the Conservative Research Department, though it doubtless owed much to the example set by his father, a stockbroker from a long line of senior partners.
His opponents are likewise oblivious to the Anglican tradition of behaviour in which he was brought up, which one may reckon he absorbed via his mother from her family, the Mounts. On the tricky question of the European Union, he can pursue a via media, or middle course, where dogmatists are unable to detect one. And for Cameron it is the easiest thing in the world to strike, on behalf of all people of goodwill, a high moral tone, and when needed (i.e. when someone else has behaved badly) a note of asperity. In another life, he could have been a successful contributor to ‘Thought for the Day’.
This ability to articulate the opinions of one’s own time is necessary if one is to operate at a high level in either politics or journalism. As Bagehot put it, in his study of an earlier Tory prime minister, Sir Robert Peel: ‘A constitutional statesman is in general a man of common opinions and uncommon abilities.’ Or as one of Cameron’s early political contemporaries observed: ‘He always knew what you could say and what you couldn’t.’ Cameron knows exactly how to express ‘common opinions’, or opinions that are just about to become common, for example on gay marriage.
It cannot be said Cameron has managed to form a close emotional connection with the British people. He seldom if ever sounds convincing when he decides to be passionate, for he will not give enough of himself away. He likes to be in control, and sets a high value on competence.
Control and competence are seen as dreary virtues, and few people have spotted the methodical shamelessness with which he uses his powers of patronage to strengthen his grip on power. In the creation of privy counsellors and peers, he has been profligate on an 18th-century scale. This does not mean he hands out, like some latter-day Walpole, offices of enormous profit to their holders, or that he gives most of the best places to members of his own family.
In 21st-century politics, people can be bought for so very little: most often, just by some soothing of their vanity. One has only to read Alan Clark’s diaries to see how an intelligent man can be consumed by the desire for a footling ministerial post. And no one in modern times has had a greater genius than Cameron for distributing those footling ministerial posts to the combination of people best calculated to keep him in power. He gives hope to everyone, young and old, male and female, Left and Right, bright and dim, that their time will come.
Before killing off the Liberal Democrats, Cameron gave them hope with a juicy allocation of offices, more generous than their numbers merited. Now he keeps his own backbenchers salivating at the prospect of future favours, and along with his collaborator, Osborne, finds room in the system for the recruitment of gifted non-tories (Robert Chote, Mark Carney, Andrew Adonis). Again and again, he inserts a round peg into a round hole. The craftsmanship of his cabinetmaking amounts to a kind of genius.
Presumably, like Supermac, Supercam will lose his touch in the end. But we ought to enjoy, or shudder at, the sight of such mastery while it lasts. Cameron has divided the Opposition, made fools of the pollsters, and prompted the election by Labour of a less promising leader than Michael Foot. The Prime Minister has subverted our parliamentary tradition by making it predictable, so that we already know the next general election will be on 7th May 2020, and have a good idea who will win it.