Margaret Thatcher) to impose economic sanctions on South Africa had become bitterly controversial.
Nonetheless, the trip had been offered to him by his Research Department boss Alistair Cooke and it seemed too good an opportunity to turn down. The fact that Cameron’s godfather, Tim Rathbone, was a passionate opponent of the apartheid regime but was himself opposed to sanctions may also have played a role in sweeping away any qualms Cameron might have had. The trip had been offered to the Research Department by Derek Laud, who fifteen years later was to become known to a wider public as a contestant on Big Brother. But in 1989 he was best known as a fixture on the scene of the Tory far right. That he was both black and gay made him unusual enough, that he was an enthusiastic member of the Monday Club, the anti-immigration group, and liked to ride to hounds ensured that few in Conservative politics were unaware of this flamboyant libertarian.
Laud had started in politics as a research assistant to Michael Brown, at the time the Tory MP for Scunthorpe. Through Brown, Laud had met Cameron’s future father-in-law Sir Reggie Sheffield, a grandee of his local party, with whom he became friends. Other contacts included Michael Colvin and Neil Hamilton, two Tory MPs who were later to become embroiled in the cash-for-questions scandal, partly through their association with Laud. Laud was working as a lobbyist and was employed by Strategy Network International, which had been set up in 1985 specifically to lobby against the imposition of sanctions on South Africa and as a propagandist for Unita, the Angolan opposition group, and for the so-called ‘transitional government’ of Namibia set up in defiance of a UN resolution. Rival lobbyists accused SNI of being controlled by Pretoria. Laud recommended Colvin and Hamilton, who were both recruited as consultants – something they failed to enter properly in the House of Commons register of members’ interests, which came back to haunt them when the cash-for-questions scandal broke in 1994.
According to a contemporary report, one of Colvin’s jobs was:
to identify sympathetic MPs who might be interested in what came to be called the ‘Bop run’ – trips, generally all expenses paid, for handpicked Tory MPs to the unrecognised Bophuthatswana ‘homeland’, one of the dumping grounds for the three million black people evicted from their homes in the former South African government’s ‘whitening the cities’ offensive…Appearing before the Select Committee on Members’ Interests in 1989, Ian Findlay, who ran Bophuthatswana’s London office, was asked: ‘Are you satisfied that your government is getting good value for money from visits by British MPs?’ He replied: ‘Yes, very much so.’
There is no suggestion that the trips were not declared in the register, but allegations of a ‘gravy train’, paid for by the apartheid regime, abounded. To the annoyance of the homeland authorities, the form would sometimes be a one-day stop in Bophuthatswana before MPs escaped to a beach holiday in Natal or Cape Town. The usual practice was to offer first-class travel, with the alternative of cashing in a single ticket for two club class seats, enabling MPs to take spouses. A number chose the second option.
Findlay’s full evidence to the committee provides an illustration of the sort of largesse pro-apartheid groups were prepared to dish out to sympathetic Tories. Trips, sometimes led by Colvin himself, would typically last ten days and cost SNI around £2,000 a head in flights, hotels and meals for the fact-finding Tories and their wives, he said.
But it wasn’t just MPs who attracted the attention of the pro-apartheid lobbyists. Laud, who also picked likely targets on behalf of SNI’s clients (they included big mining concerns and other multinationals like Anglo American, Bear Stearns and the South African Chamber of Mines), was delighted to be able to accommodate one of the Tory Party’s bright young things. He invited Cameron to South Africa to‘see for himself’ what effect sanctions would be likely to have on those who were employed in the mines and elsewhere. That the imports of cheap South African coal had helped the Thatcher administration win the miners’ strike would have been an additional attraction for Cameron, who had worked in the CRD’s economic section before being promoted. Alistair Cooke decided that Cameron was a suitable recipient of what he looks back on as ‘simply a jolly’. ‘It was all terribly relaxed, just a little treat, a perk of the job,’ says Cooke. ‘The Botha regime was attempting to make itself look less horrible, but I don’t regard it as having been of the faintest political consequence.’
A senior bureaucrat recalls that the civil service advice about such trips was ‘not to touch them with a barge-pole’. It was also felt inadvisable for special advisers, who were unconstrained by the demands of political neutrality, to accept such deals. But David Cameron, neither a civil servant nor a special adviser, evidently saw no reason to look this gift-horse in the mouth, and spent eight days with Derek Laud, being treated lavishly, visiting mines and factories in Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town. Perhaps inevitably, the prospect of Laud and Cameron spending a week travelling together (a third person was supposed to have gone on the trip with them, but dropped out at the last minute) provoked a degree of tittering in Central Office. Someone remarked that if, after a trip down a mine, Laud suggested having a shower, Cameron was not obliged to accept.
Nelson Mandela was released from prison in February 1990 and was later president for five years, honoured all over the world for his championing of reconciliation. David Cameron visited South Africa as Tory leader in August 2007 in order to meet him. Amid a great fanfare, he announced a major break with Margaret Thatcher’s foreign policy, while keeping noticeably quiet about his own. He advertised himself as being on the side of Mandela and said: ‘The mistakes my party made in the past with respect to relations with the ANC [African National Congress] and sanctions on South Africa make it all the more important to listen now.’ Such talk cannot but be seen, at the very least, as an insurance policy against his earlier visit becoming public knowledge.
Cameron was only in his early twenties when he made the trip. He may defend it now as fact-finding, but it was hardly the act of a vigorous and typical anti-apartheid campaigner. Nor does the list of fellow Tories who made the trip sit well with the new-found liberalism of the modern Conservatives. As Lord Hughes of Woodside, then a central player in the anti-apartheid movement, says, ‘It is almost impossible now to find anyone who wasn’t against apartheid; I wish there were as many opposed to it then as say they were now.’
As might be expected given its school-like atmosphere, the Cameron-era CRD seems to have seen its fair share of shifting allegiances, slammed doors and tearful scenes. As he had done before, Cameron thrived on being ‘one of the gang’. Among those of his peers he admired and could see were going places, he was charming and fun. Those outside the circle did not often see his best side. Some thought him bumptious, others bullying. ‘He had personability, intelligence, ambition and good judgement, but he could be a little sharp-tempered and wasn’t charitably disposed to people who thought differently from him.’ Another colleague was more vehement: ‘He saw it as a way of making himself look good to make other people look stupid. He was a bombastic bully dismissive of those who didn’t agree with him.’
Rupert Morris, author of a book about the Tories, says Cameron ‘had a certain golden-boy aura about him. He was sleek and tanned, wore an expensive suit, and his eyes moved impatiently – as if he was unlikely to waste time chatting to anyone unimportant.’ Perhaps as a result of the fall-out from his affair with Adshead, Cameron thereafter dated women outside politics. Bray remembers him arriving at the party’s social functions with ‘various young lovelies’ unknown to the Smith Square set. She recalls Cameron emerging as the pre-eminent figure of their group at this time. A senior figure describes Whetstone as being ‘taut and nervy’, Hilton as an ‘oddball’ (he used to wear a voluminous poncho to work) and Vaizey as ‘idle’. They were all outshone by the self-assured, cool, intelligent and hard-working Cameron.
Michael McCrum, a former headmaster of Eton, has said that Etonians have ‘the priceless art of putting adults at their ease’. But Cameron had something else. Guy Black, director of the CRD’s most important arm, the Political Section, saw in him not only intelligence but a rare political ability – an instinctive feel for opponents’ weak spots and a ruthlessness in exploiting them. Black liked his tactical nous as well as his arrogance. He had quickly moved Cameron out of CRD’s