Francis Elliott - Cameron - Practically a Conservative

Yet there was always a keenness not to disappoint. Those close to the family remember few occasions when either parent was moved to anger. Both of them exerted an implicit but benign authority, an enviable degree of control, which meant that the children always knew where they stood. If standards had not been met, a quiet ‘I see’ and a knowing glance would be sufficient. Indeed, this seems to have been enough to instil a strong desire to succeed, to win parental approval. ‘In some homes, where there are bright children, they can get the better of the father, but Ian was definitely the boss – he ruled the roost,’ says a friend. It was, says Susan Rathbone, the widow of David Cameron’s godfather, ‘quite a tight household…you wouldn’t get away with just lounging on the sofa. No beer cans on the carpet. It was a lovely, comfortable, delicious home, but there was no slacking.’

This was true of school reports too, when the formality of the process alone would imply a certain seriousness. The children would be called in to see their father, who would read out the report before they had a chance to see it. Disapproval did not have to be obvious to be effective. It was clearly spelt out, though, on at least one occasion when, a family friend remembers, Ian had been informed of a misdemeanour at Eton. David Cameron was firmly told that his father was not paying the hefty school fees in order for him to break school rules.

While all families go through friction and periods of stress – and the Camerons have had their share of crosses to bear – their friends speak uniformly of their readiness to support one another. Neither parent can be said to be dominant, and David Cameron appeared to be equally respectful towards both. Ian and Mary Cameron ‘have a good, healthy relationship, thoroughly solid and practical’, says Susan Rathbone. ‘It’s a great image of marriage he has grown up with. They’re just very good at dealing with life.’ A former girlfriend of David agrees: ‘His parents are very cool, settled in themselves, very calm and sure of themselves. There are no psychological issues there. There’s something very wholesome, but not in a boring way.’ For Giles Andreae, whose mother had been a debutante with the young Mary Mount and who is one of David’s lifelong friends, there is something almost intimidating about the Camerons’ partnership: ‘That couple, they’re both so self-assured and magnanimous. They have so many friends. It’s almost quite scary if you’re not very confident yourself.’

While the parents wanted their children to be aware of how privileged they were, it must have been difficult for a playful, popular little boy to imagine how different ‘real life’ was for the majority of the population. In this Eden of cricket matches and gambolling through fields, it would have been understandable if the Cameron children had taken it for granted that the world is a pretty happy place. ‘It is a very natural age,’ says Giles Andreae, now a writer of children’s books. ‘Obviously you are aware that some people have big houses and some people have small houses, and that not everyone spends their time swimming and playing tennis. Privilege in itself is not a bad thing, it is how you deal with it that matters.’

The house of David Cameron’s childhood is now owned by his elder brother Alex, who lives there with his wife and children. Gwen Hoare, for whom the family built a flat in the Old Rectory’s stables (she had her eighty-sixth birthday in February 2007), is thus seeing a third generation of the family grow up. Ian and Mary Cameron live in a smaller house abutting its grounds. Both remain a strong influence on their now famous son. ‘Mary is one of the most compassionate people I know,’ says Susan Rathbone. ‘She’s level headed, not remotely impressed by froth and completely no nonsense.’

In the early 1990s Ian Cameron had to have one of his legs amputated and replaced by a prosthetic one, and in early 2006 he had the other one amputated, but as ever he minimised the inconvenience. In the latter year, he got an infection in one eye following an operation and lost the use of it. With two prosthetic legs and a walking stick, friends say admiringly, Ian would now, just, and with some reluctance, own up to being ‘disabled’. Giles Andreae says, ‘Ian is one of the most confident and self-assured people I have ever met. I don’t remember his disability ever being an issue. It wasn’t that it was not discussed out of good manners, it just wasn’t an issue. He’s a breezy, sociable, outgoing, affable man. Those are the qualities that would have had more effect on David.’ Yet the influence of Ian’s disability was enormous, if unstated. For a start, the children had a constant reminder that the petty everyday complaints of childhood were minor indeed. ‘Whingeing wasn’t on the menu,’ says one family member. It may be that Ian Cameron, while seeking to impart certain values, was anxious to protect his sons from the pressures – emotional and financial – that he had felt when growing up. ‘[David’s] parents were fantastic,’ says Pete Czernin, an Eton friend. ‘They were never pushy with their children; they gave them all implicit confidence without cockiness.’

Yet, for all the lack of witting parental pressure to succeed, Ian’s unstated determination made him a hard man to live up to. Without wishing it, he set a high bar. Susan Rathbone agrees that, tacitly, a standard was set. There may be, she says, ‘a subconscious drive that Dave has got from Ian’s incredible example. Ian has vast enthusiasm – which Dave has inherited – and a sort of unstoppableness which I’m sure is very inspirational to live with.’ When he was thirteen, Cameron is said to have told a friend: ‘He is my role model. Dad has never let his disability hold him back. He has proved you can do anything you want in life.’

At the age of seven David Cameron was sent to Heatherdown Preparatory School near Ascot in Berkshire. With just under a hundred pupils, Heatherdown was small but smart, with one former master claiming that it was ‘the most select school in the country’.

Its business was to take impressionable young boys from comfortably-off families and unapologetically mould them into little gentlemen of the old school. Prince Andrew and Prince Edward were both educated at Heatherdown. Their cousin Marina Mowatt has said: ‘I’ll never forget the smell of the place – pencil sharpenings, sausages and boys.’ David Cameron’s manners, confidence and sense of duty were all enhanced at Heatherdown. It may also have helped develop his mental and emotional resilience, and it certainly fixed him in the highest social milieu.

Today very few children are sent to boarding school so young, and thirty-three years ago it was beginning to fall out of fashion even among the rich. (Heatherdown itself closed while Cameron was still at Eton.) He says that it was an ‘absurdly young’ age to be required to leave home. It was some comfort to him that his elder brother Alex was already a pupil. And, like generations of other prep school boarders before him, Cameron seems to have adjusted to his new life, helped in his first few weeks by being just one of a group of seven-year-old boys a long way from home. He spent his first term in a pleasant adjunct to the main school called Heatherlea, where the boys could be gently acclimatised to life in a boarding school. ‘We were mollycoddled a good deal at Heatherlea,’ says an old boy. ‘Mostly what I remember is the endless pillow-fights and non-stop ragging in the dorm.’ After a term or two at Heatherlea, boys were confronted with a more forbidding and traditional dormitory of about a dozen boys in the main school. On arrival, new occupants were allowed to bring their own rug – to cover the Spartan wooden floorboards – and their own teddy.