The person on the other end of the line said, “I understand that you are to see David Cameron. I’ve tried everything I can to dissuade him from wasting his time on politics, but I have failed. I am ringing to tell you that you are about to meet a truly remarkable young man.”’ Cooke adds, ‘I thought, “Why is this unknown person giving me this unsolicited testimonial?” if that is what it was: there was no attempt to persuade me either way, to take him or not to take him.’
A call like that is bound to lodge in the mind. Indeed Cooke says he dined out on it endlessly, long before Cameron became well known. The story first surfaced publicly shortly after Cameron became leader when Harris was thought by some (erroneously, says Harris) to have suggested that the new Conservative leader owed his first position in politics, in part, to string-pulling. In any event, Cooke disagrees. He says he told Robin Harris about it at the time, and that it had no bearing on the outcome. ‘Clearly David was quite outstanding – one of the very best of all the young people I interviewed over the years – and needed no help from anyone to impress the people at Central Office. But that does not alter the fact that what the voice from the Palace told me was absolutely true.’
So who was the mystery caller? It might be fair to assume that it was Captain Sir Alastair Aird, then Comptroller and later equerry to the Queen Mother and husband of Fiona Aird, Cameron’s godmother. That, indeed, was David Cameron’s own belief when the story first surfaced. But the suggestion is vehemently denied by the Airds. Lady Aird, having repudiated the suggestion, consulted her husband for confirmation and said: ‘Alastair has never ever made that sort of call. He was incredibly careful about being thought to have used his position or anything. It could not possibly have been Alastair. They’re hugely proscribed from doing anything political. I just know that it could not have been Alastair.’
When this was put to David Cameron’s office, they suggested that perhaps the caller had been Sir Brian McGrath, a Peasemore neighbour and friend of Cameron’s parents who then worked as private secretary to Prince Philip. But he, too, though named as a referee for the job, denies it. ‘It wasn’t me,’ he says. ‘I don’t think they even called me, to ask me to vouch for his character and so on. I certainly didn’t initiate anything. He’s quite capable of standing on his own two feet without any help from me. One thing I’m certain of is that I didn’t ring Central Office.’ Frustratingly, the phantom string-puller has yet to be unmasked.
Assuming the call wasn’t a hoax, the story illustrates, as if that were needed, how well connected Cameron is. But, tantalisingly, it fails to answer the question of how committed he was to going into politics when he left university. The mystery caller had said he was determined to enter politics, despite attempts to persuade him against it, yet in fact he had already applied for other jobs. At what point had this determination struck? Was it when prospective employers failed to detect an aptitude for knuckling down to a City career? He was also interviewed by the Economist but was turned down – mercifully, he says, as he is not by nature a journalist. He has said that he applied for CRD when he came across a brochure from the Oxford careers department in his pigeonhole. Some say he simply fell into the Conservative Party because, having applied to all the blue-chip merchant banks and management consultants (William Hague’s McKinsey’s among them), he had failed to find a job elsewhere.
Robin Harris has no recollection of Cameron’s interview but thinks he would have asked him two standard questions. One, ‘Why do you think you are a Conservative?’ to assess ideological commitment, and the other, ‘What do you think of the Medium-Term Financial Strategy?’ to apply a little intellectual pressure. Even for those familiar with the rigours of one-to-one tutorials with Oxbridge dons, CRD interviews could be an intimidating experience. But Cameron, despite – rather than because of – the royal intervention, did well enough to be offered a position.
When he first reported for duty at Smith Square on 26 September 1988 he was stepping on to an established fast-track to high political office. The list of former CRD staffers who have gone on to greatness is a long one. When Cameron was there, Michael Portillo was the most recent of its graduates to have made it into the Cabinet. Portillo’s biographer, Michael Gove, describes CRD as a ‘nursery of Tory talent’. ‘The CRD is part of the party machine but subtly superior to the rest of it – in much the same way as the Guards are to the rest of the Army. It is primarily a secretariat to the party when in government, an alternative civil service when in opposition, a supplier of ammunition in elections, and an intelligence-gatherer and disseminator at all times. But its status and influence extends beyond the sum of its functions.’
Cameron joined at a crucial juncture in the history of the Conservative Party. Just eighteen months earlier, Margaret Thatcher had won a third successive election victory – a feat that hadn’t been achieved for more than a century – but her power was beginning to ebb away. Michael Heseltine had already dealt the first blow by resigning over the Westland affair in 1986 while Cameron was in his first year at Oxford. Tensions over Europe, the direction of economic policy and the political consequences of the poll tax ground away at Thatcher’s waning power base during her third term. With Heseltine a standard around which rebels on the backbenches rallied, Thatcher thought she could at least rely on the total, unswerving loyalty of the Research Department.
Her speech on 20 September 1988 in Bruges, Belgium, setting her face against a European Union ‘super state’, might have infuriated some parliamentary colleagues. But nowhere would it have been more rapturously received than on the fourth floor of Conservative Central Office, home of the CRD. One of those already there describes a ‘hyper right-wing Zeitgeist’ infecting the young zealots working under Harris and Cooke. Cameron, says his former colleague, quickly fitted in. He showed few signs of disavowing this Zeitgeist, which entailed Thatcher herself being universally and reverentially referred to in private conversation as ‘Mother’.
The young PPE graduate was handed the Trade and Industry, Energy and Privatisation brief, a respectable if rather dry subject area. He shared an office, 512, with another researcher under the direction of Ian Stewart, head of the Economic Section. The office was one of a number arranged down a long corridor with Harris and Cooke at one end; next in superiority was Guy Black, head of the Political Section, and thereafter offices corresponded roughly to the great Whitehall departments. Thus Cameron, aged twenty-two, was nominally in charge of Conservative Party research into trade and industry policy.
The formality and hierarchy of the office accommodation reflected the ethos of the CRD, which was run much like a school. A call to see the director or his deputy could be a prelude to a bruising encounter for young men and women more accustomed to being told how clever they were. Set exacting standards, Cameron learned quickly to prepare accurate, succinct papers to order. His facility for writing clear and powerful briefs was honed in CRD, although one of his managers said he showed natural ability from the start. But while the department’s professionalism would stand him in excellent stead, what was really invaluable were his new colleagues.
It is a remarkable feature of the backroom staff and kitchen cabinet that have surrounded Cameron since he won the leadership that so many worked with him at CRD in the run-up to the 1992 election or shortly afterwards. Just as in the private sphere, where his circle of friends has not greatly widened from those that he made at Eton, so politically he has fashioned a Praetorian guard from early allies and friends. His stint in Smith Square holds many keys to his choices a decade and a half later.
This ‘gathering of the gang’ is worthy of some scrutiny. The first important contact Cameron made was another Old Etonian graduate of Oxford. Ed Llewellyn, a year older, had been a distant figure at both school and university (where he, unlike the current Tory leader, was active in student politics). Even now that they were colleagues – Llewellyn was handed the tricky European Community brief – his relative seniority put him, initially at least, above the new arrival’s station.
The next to arrive was another Oxford graduate named Ed with a reputation as a hack. The name Ed Vaizey had become a fixture in Cherwell during his time at Oxford as the student newspaper detailed the exuberant antics of the right-wing son of Lord Vaizey, the eminent