The PM has more to worry about than Wellies
Last summer, when Sir Anthony Seldon’s thoughtful and wellresearched book about David Cameron was published, I read a story in it I thought so preposterous that it convinced me that the normally sober and serious Sir Anthony was having us on. He recorded that when the Somerset Levels were as afflicted by serious flooding as the North is today, the Prime Minister’s staff made an urgent decision for him. It was not about how to save the homes and possessions of the poor devils who had been inundated: it was about the need to find Mr Cameron a pair of Wellington boots that would stop him looking “posh”.
Apparently, he owned only a pair of Hunter green wellies. And why shouldn’t he? Many of us do. It seems, however, that they are a badge of the plutocratic elite, even if you own only modest ones. If you have a top-of-the-range £400 leather-lined pair you are, presumably, fit only for the next tumbrel. Never mind that they tend to last much longer than cheap boots that perish rapidly and, if you must spend hours out of doors on cold days (such as at the shooting parties Mr Cameron feels he must no longer attend), often come with linings that keep your feet warm: poshness is the most unforgivable crime a senior politician can commit.
The £12.99 rubber jobs from Asda were considered perfect, until people ridiculed them for looking brand new: which they were. The flunkey who bought them had not taken the obvious precaution of dragging them through a slurry pit first, or distressing them with horse manure. Last week, when Mr Cameron made a questionable visit to floodstricken York, he wore neither Hunters nor his cheap boots from Asda, but some new £12.99 jobs, by a firm called Countrywide. Image, in case we did not know, is everything.
We are told that Philip Hammond, the Foreign Secretary, once wore a pair of Hunters, and a journalist sneered at him for doing so. Mr Cameron fears repeating his mistake. What must the stricken people of York have made of this? Would they rather Mr Cameron devoted his mental energies to stopping their lives being devastated every time it rains heavily, or to ensuring he doesn’t overdo the poshness when he pitches up in public? I think we know the answer.
Mr Cameron is a former PR man, and PR men spend much of their lives on behalf of their clients arranging elaborate pretences to create impressions that are entirely false. Normally, though, these will be false in the opposite direction: the client, or his product or service, is represented as being of higher quality and esteem than it actually is. Mr Cameron’s obsession is with doing quite the opposite, but he makes a poor fist of it.
I suspect one of the reasons the public don’t warm to Mr Cameron is they suspect he isn’t genuine. They are right. Wearing a pair of £12.99 wellies can’t alter the fact that one went to Eton and Oxford and has a trust fund. The public know all this: why try to convince them otherwise? Mr Hammond’s error, when someone took the mickey out of his wellies, was not to tell them to get stuffed, as the late Alan Clark occasionally did when anyone had the temerity to observe that he was a bit grand. Because, in the scheme of things, the wellies you wear simply don’t matter a thousandth as much as stopping a family from having their home flooded.
Where will all this end? Mr Cameron apparently buys his suits from a Savile Row tailor called Richard James, who charges up to £3,500 a time. Will he now go off-the-peg from Debenhams? He lives in a rather nice house in rural Oxfordshire, suitable for entertaining fellow members of the Chipping Norton Set to what they grandly call “kitchen suppers”. Is he about to hand it over to some of the homeless immigrants he has let into the country, and go on the waiting list for a council flat? Of course not: and nobody would expect him to. So why make this elaborate and insulting pretence over some Wellington boots?
Shamefully, he nearly refused to wear morning dress to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s wedding in 2011 for the same reason – that he might look “posh”. It showed how out of touch he is. A trip around England on any Saturday afternoon will reveal lots of men, few with Mr Cameron’s advantages in life, in morning dress attending weddings, because the bride and groom wish to have a special occasion. Such people would not have thought Mr Cameron “posh” for attending the Royal wedding properly dressed: they would have thought him damned rude to have done anything else.
In the York incident, it was not what Mr Cameron wore that mattered, it was the posturing of his visiting at all, with people increasingly aware that the billions we give to dodgy Third World dictatorships in overseas aid could equally have been used to stop British taxpayers nearly being drowned in their own homes. His obsession with appearances comes at the cost of a failure to understand what really has to be done. It is all about the obsessive substitution of superficial considerations for profound and serious ones.
We may be a class-based society but we are not a class-hating one. Most people take a view of live and let live. They understand that the Prime Minister comes from a background most of them do not share, but they are not so ignorant nor so prejudiced as to judge him on that basis – however much he provokes them to do so by constantly rewarding and promoting his friends and cronies. If Mr Cameron really does want to be popular – and with no opposition anywhere in sight, he may feel such a thing is unnecessary – then being himself, and dropping the poses and posturing, would be an effective way to do it.
Social class doesn’t matter as much as stopping homes from being flooded