for advocating support for the breakaway Pro-Euro Conservatives in 1997) and a vigorous opponent of apartheid in South Africa, he had also just rebelled against the abolition of the Greater London Council when his godson showed up for the first leg of a work-experience package that might have been designed to help him choose between politics and business.
Rathbone set him to work on two favourite themes, the lack of adequate nursery education and the manifold failures of his government’s drugs policy. (The latter prefigured Cameron’s own efforts as an MP in this area sixteen years later.) Inspired, Cameron started attending debates in the chamber of the House of Commons. He was present when Enoch Powell, speaking in an embryo-research debate, was interrupted by protesters throwing rape alarms from the public gallery.
But commerce as well as politics flows in his veins, and three months after arriving in the Commons he left it, heading for Hong Kong. Ian Cameron, through his employers Panmure Gordon, was stockbroker to the Keswick family. Henry Keswick was Chairman of Jardine Matheson, the Hong Kong-based conglomerate. Through that connection, Cameron was given the opportunity to work for the company in Hong Kong for three months. ‘His father Ian is a good friend of my father and uncle and of mine,’ explains Keswick. ‘We get friends of the firm, some of whose children want to go and get some experience of living abroad, under our mantle. We take a lot of interns before they go to Oxford or Cambridge and we take them for three months.’ Cameron – as his brother Alex had done three years earlier – worked for the Jardine Matheson shipping agency as what is known as a ‘ship jumper’. When a ship – for which Jardine is the agent – arrives in Hong Kong, a ship jumper would go out with a pilot in a launch, meet the captain, tell him which buoy to go to and check that all the documents were in order. The job was administrative, requiring no great talent, but it did need someone presentable and personable.
Cameron lived in one of Jardine’s company flats, sharing with other employees, and being generally well looked after, if modestly paid. He lived a largely expat life, mixing mostly with business people and enjoying the penultimate decade of Britain’s imperial control of the colony. It was an agreeably safe way of seeing the exotic East, a risk-free brush with the orient, interesting enough to feed the mind, but scarcely worthy of Indiana Jones. One day some acquaintances, anxious to explore a more vernacular Hong Kong beyond the bland, globally ubiquitous office blocks, said they wanted to go out in search of a small market or local restaurant of the sort where ‘real’ Hong Kong residents would go, and asked if Cameron might care to join them. In the event he was busy, but he couldn’t resist observing that the Hong Kong of big business was every bit as representative of ‘the real Hong Kong’ as any back-street enterprise of the sort they were talking about.
His journey back from the colony was rather more adventurous. In early June, he sailed (via a few days in Japan) to Nakhodka in what was then still the Soviet Union, before moving on to Khabarovsk, where he joined the Trans Siberian Railway and travelled to Moscow to meet a schoolfriend, Anthony Griffith. Although the reforming Mikhail Gorbachev had just become the Soviet leader, the country was still gripped by Stalinist illiberalism. For two young men to venture there without a guide was unusual. The pair travelled to what is now called St Petersburg, from where they flew down to Yalta on the Black Sea, scene of Winston Churchill’s famous 1945 encounter with Stalin and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
While there, lying blamelessly on an Intourist (state-sanctioned tourist) beach, they encountered two men, rather older than them. One spoke perfect English, the other perfect French. They were normally dressed, extremely friendly and evidently well off. Cameron and Griffith were not going to look this gift horse in the mouth and gratefully accepted their invitation to dinner. They were treated to vast amounts of caviar, sturgeon and so on, while being asked lots of questions about life in the UK. They sensed they were being encouraged to make disobliging remarks about Britain, but, patriotic even in the face of a caviar bribe, they resisted. The Russians were not to be put off. At the end of the meal they suggested meeting again the following night, to which the Old Etonians agreed. In the event, the Brits, by now a bit concerned and wondering whether their new friends’ motive was political, or possibly homosexual, failed to turn up at the chosen restaurant. Back in England, Cameron told friends this story, idly wondering if this was possibly a KGB attempt to recruit them, and – James Bond fan that he is – is tempted to believe it was. Had things gone differently, he and Griffith might have become the Burgess and Maclean de nos jours. As it turned out, their flit was westwards. From Yalta they headed for Kiev and thence, by now armed with Interrail passes, on to Romania, Hungary and western Europe, where Cameron dropped in to see his step-grandmother Marielen Schlumberger at her lakeside family home on Attersee, in Austria.
Cameron’s gap year gave him a taste of the two worlds to which he was attracted. Commerce would have been happy enough to have him. ‘We did say to David’, remembers Keswick,‘that if he’d like to come back and work for us, he should apply to us after university.’ But politics – and the influence of Tim Rathbone – won. Today as he tries to steer his party leftwards towards the political centre, Cameron knows that his late godfather, the man who helped inspire him to become a Tory MP in the first place, would have approved whole-heartedly.
It was both a hostage to class warriors and a stroke of some brilliance–whether spontaneous or planned – when Cameron claimed in October 2005 that he had had ‘a normal university experience’. Regularly child-minding a Rastafarian’s infant son while the father cooks goat curry is most decidedly not a standard ‘university experience’. Punting with Jade Jagger is not normal. And dressing up in tailcoats and drinking dangerous quantities of vintage claret is normal only for a very small number of people. Cameron made his claim in deflecting a question about whether he had taken drugs at university. ‘If you go to university and don’t go to parties there is something wrong,’ he continued at a conference fringe event the day after his leadership election-winning speech. Had he answered the question directly and honestly the answer would almost certainly have been yes. But his consumption of cannabis – at most infrequent and moderate – during his three years at Oxford University is one of the less interesting features of his ‘normal’ residence at that great seat of learning.
David Cameron arrived at Brasenose College in Michaelmas term 1985 to read Politics, Philosophy and Economics. By the mid-1980s Oxford colleges were coming under pressure to admit more candidates educated at state schools, but the intake of Brasenose in 1985 suggests that that college’s tutors, at least, were not minded to submit. In lining up for his matriculation photograph Cameron found himself in familiar company. Five other Old Etonians had won places that year out of around a hundred freshers. Cameron was only the second Etonian in twenty-seven years to read PPE at the college. It was an unusually large intake from the school, especially for Brasenose, not one of Oxford’s grander colleges. While Christ Church and Balliol tend to attract the cream of the public school clientele, Brasenose is more modest, smaller and more intimate than most. It is located at the heart of the university on Radcliffe Square but is proud of its insularity; new members are not generally anxious about making a big impact on the wider Oxford stage.
Toby Young, a satirist, who overlapped with Cameron for a year at Brasenose, has drawn a caricature of its social ecology at the time. Its students, he has written, divided between ‘stains’ and ‘socialites’. The former anorak-wearing products of suburban state-education are contrasted with the more physically attractive scions of the elite. ‘Stains’ tried to get on in life, both academically and socially, and were despised as they did so by their rugby-playing, hard-drinking, privately educated peers. Young records how Cameron’s ‘unusually large number of Etonians’ threatened to disturb this scene when they arrived on the battleground in 1985. ‘Loud, hearty and unpretentious’, they joined forces with the ‘stain’-baiters eventually. ‘Initially the “sound” college men were a little suspicious of these young bloods, imagining that their apparent sympathy was merely a sophisticated form of taking the piss. However after the Old Etonians had proved themselves to be solid drinkers and didn’t complain when the hearties parked tigers