to what they saw as his Etonian arrogance and resented him drifting in and out in his tailcoat for smart dinners. To some of those with a proprietorial sense of loyalty towards the college, he seemed to be having it both ways. There was something else about his social polish that some contemporaries found offputting. They claim that if Cameron found someone ‘socially interesting’ he would turn on the charm. For those not in favour, however, he had little time. This was nothing to do with class, assert his detractors, more a feline disposition to insinuate himself with the current in-crowd.
In his second year he joined the Ball Committee, tasked with organising the college’s May Ball. The committee’s chairman was Andrew Feldman, with whom he became friends. Cameron won a certain credit by persuading Dr Feelgood to play, despite the college’s scant resources (to save money, Feldman arranged for Brasenose to use the flagging flowers from Worcester College’s ball the night before).
Cameron’s membership of the Bullingdon Club has attracted much attention. It is an elitist dining club characterised by vast, boozy dinners and subsequent debauchery. Evelyn Waugh satirised it in Decline and Fall, calling it the Bollinger Club. ‘It numbers reigning kings among its past members,’ wrote Waugh. ‘At the last meeting, three years ago, a fox had been brought in in a cage and stoned with champagne bottles.’ Its defenders would say it represented merely youthful letting off of steam, a harmless juvenile excess. But members of ‘the Buller’ saw themselves as being in a class of their own and were inclined to glory in the antagonism they provoked in others (who would be accused of envy, bourgeois small-mindedness, priggishness and so on). If their over-exuberance was hard to swallow at the best of times, during the Thatcher years their snobbish and youthful self-regard would have shown them at their very worst.
When at the end of his first year Cameron was invited to join this socially prestigious, if rowdy, company he was flattered. ‘If you’re young and good looking you want to put your toe in all the waters,’ says Susan Rathbone, whose husband Tim had been a Bullingdon member a generation earlier. ‘Tim, who David admired and liked, would certainly have said to Dave, as he said it to his own children, “Make the most of it and don’t work too hard.” You can miss so much if you are totally studious at Oxford, although the Cameron family would not have liked the hooray side of it.’
With the approbation bestowed by the club came a price (even if his tailcoat was borrowed). One night, David Cameron returned to his room in college to find it had been ransacked. His furniture had been removed and considerable damage done. Cameron was called to see the Dean, a move of some seriousness. It was explained that this sort of thing was not welcomed, least of all at a college like Brasenose, and that the culprits needed to be identified. Cameron, obliged by the Buller’s code of omertà, refused and bore the punishment alone.
By general consent, Cameron was not a typical Bullingdon member. As one of his more thoughtful and deft Etonian friends puts it, with some understatement, ‘Dave is a cautious man, someone who would think twice before throwing a bottle at a policeman.’ Some say the control he applied to his excesses shows him as being rather more calculating than a carefree teenager ought to be. When policemen’s helmets were being removed, shotguns being loosed off from the back of cars or waitresses insulted, McCavity wasn’t there.
Giles Andreae and Dominic Loehnis (a school and university contemporary who became very friendly with Cameron in the early 1990s) both say they have never seen Cameron ‘out of control’ drunk. ‘He would have got off his face at the Bullingdon,’ says a close friend, ‘but all that vomiting and so on would not have been him at all.’ Another friend, no stranger to disciplinary procedures, says: ‘All that stuff with people being sick over each other just wasn’t his thing. He was a responsible sort of person. Without being square, what flicked his switch was wit and repartee. He just wasn’t the sort to get roaring drunk and destroy the fittings – he wasn’t nearly wild enough. If he was in company when people were doing that sort of thing, he’d worry and say, “Oh, don’t do that.”’
Why, then, did he agree to join the Bullingdon? One longstanding friend said he was ‘amazed’ that he accepted, as it didn’t seem his cup of tea at all. According to his own account, it was because ‘Friends did. You do things at university.’ He was, though, a popular figure, had been to Eton and could afford it. ‘Because he was confident and sociable and easy in his skin, people liked him,’ said a friend. Wanting to enjoy Oxford to the full, he was disinclined to say no. As Susan Rathbone said in another context, ‘He’s a great one for giving something a go.’ And, as James Fergusson says, Bullingdon dinners ‘did at least start off sober’. A bit like the man who buys Playboy magazine for the interviews, Cameron seems to have gone along to the Bullingdon for the conversation.
Nevertheless, even for Cameron, being a member of the Bullingdon was not a risk-free business and he had some close escapes. One evening, after the statutory drunken dinner, a handful of Bullingdon members took against a pot plant growing outside an unpretentious restaurant in central Oxford, presumably because it infringed the members’ exquisite notion of good taste. So they threw it through the window of the restaurant, causing mayhem and distress. The police were called and arrests were made. At this point ‘the Etonians’ (as one present described them) saw no point in getting themselves needlessly into trouble with the law – and ran for it. One who witnessed the event remembers the innocent making hasty excuses: ‘Boris Johnson turned out to be remarkably nippy for a cruiserweight, his bulky torso seen disappearing over Magdalen Bridge on a pair of skinny legs.’ A passing taxi-driver saw two weary revellers and called out, ‘Hop in, they’ve just arrested your mates over there,’ and they drove off into the night. Cameron (‘tired and in need of rest’ according to one eyewitness) had gone to bed before the incident – aware that trouble was brewing.
At the start of his second year, Cameron joined the Octagon Club, a lower-key affair but one which required members to dress up in yellow-lapelled tailcoats. He was not proposed for Brasenose’s slightly smarter Phoenix Club, one of Oxford’s oldest dining clubs and the successor to the celebrated Hellfire Club. His exclusion from membership of Brasenose’s pre-eminent dining club was on the grounds of insufficient sporting prowess, explained a contemporary. The resentment aroused among those educated at more minor public schools by Cameron’s ease with all members of the college is probably nearer the mark.
Did he take drugs at Oxford? A heavy-lidded public school friend says: ‘It was never his thing. It was all booze, mostly beer then. I was into smoking dope. He just wasn’t. If he’d wanted it he could have asked me. He was a social boozer, in a perfectly civilised sort of way.’ Giles Andreae says: ‘I couldn’t swear on my life that he never smoked a joint at Oxford, but I saw a lot of him and would be very surprised.’ The ethos of Brasenose indulgence was very much focused on alcohol, a long way from, say, that of Christ Church, where Olivia Channon, the Cabinet minister’s daughter, died at a party in 1986. Cameron’s interest in narcotics seems to have been minimal. As his friend back at Eton had said, he was always ‘measured’. A close friend says that while some of his contemporaries were trying speed, for example, he wasn’t interested. The most he had indulged in was ‘occasionally a joint or something’.
Cameron’s good looks and unforced charm meant he was rarely short of female attention. He had had lots of girlfriends in his teens and, as one friend put it, ‘he went out with some absolute crackers’. At Oxford, he would go to old-fashioned sherry parties to meet girls. He also went to the Playpen nightclub, which was run by friends and was a popular haunt for those anxious to find likemindedly uninhibited souls. There Cameron would set to work on the opposite sex for what he would call, a little crudely perhaps, an evening’s ‘wooding’. Purely as a precaution, he once felt the need to visit a sexual diseases clinic (this was not, as has been suggested, for an HIV test). On other occasions, he would simply stand at the back, puffing on a Marlboro Lite and chatting with his male friends. Women were attracted, specifically, by his intelligence, his sweetness of nature and his emotional security. Many of his friends speak of how candid, how unEnglish, he is about his emotions. Frequently he will be in tears at the end of a play or film, and be quite open and willing to talk about it. This is no wheeze: he is confident enough not to regard it as a sign of weakness.
In his first term he dated a girl called Catherine