some ‘Red Leb’, supposedly from the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, would show up. Instead of popping behind the school theatre for a fag, we started going for a joint.
In my case – comically, as I now look back on it – three of us used to hire one of the school’s double scull rowing boats and head off to a small island in the middle of the Thames called Queen’s Eyot. Being quite small back then, I was the cox. Once there, we would roll up and spend a summer’s afternoon gently off our heads.
This all came crashing down when the ‘ringleaders’ and so-called ‘dealers’ – the boys who had brought the drugs into the school – were caught and expelled. My two rowing friends were the first out of the door. I am not naming them now, not least because they’ve endured repeated approaches and entreaties from journalists to spill the beans on me. They never have.
I was one of the last to be rounded up. Boy after boy had been interrogated. It was getting close to half-term. As a minor offender, maybe I had got away with it? Not a bit of it.
I can still remember where I was sitting – in Jo Bradley’s maths class – when the door opened and I was summoned to see my housemaster, John Faulkner, in the middle of the day. This was without doubt the worst moment of my life so far. The housemaster gave me no chance for weak excuses: ‘It’s no use denying it, David, we have signed confessions from others, and we know about at least one occasion when you took drugs.’ The next stage was going to see the headmaster, Eric Anderson.
Eric is a wonderful man who has the probably unique distinction of having taught two prime ministers – Tony Blair at Fettes and me at Eton – and an heir to the throne – Prince Charles at Gordonstoun. He now lives in my old constituency, and we sometimes bump into each other in Chipping Norton or in his village of Kingham, where he lives opposite a pub I am particularly fond of.
The strange thing about that interview was that he seemed more nervous than me. I think he found the whole episode shocking, and he was clearly still coming to terms with the words for various drug paraphernalia. Because I was so keen not to implicate anyone else, I claimed – totally falsely – that I had only smoked cannabis once at Eton, and all the other times were ‘at home in the village’. This involved me telling a more and more elaborate set of lies. I am not sure he believed a word I said, but my abiding memory is the moment he asked, ‘Yes, Cameron, but who rolled the joint?’
The short-term consequences of my crime were tiresome, but I was so relieved at not being expelled that I would have been happy to accept any punishment. In the event I was ‘gated’ (restricted to within the school grounds), fined £20 for the smoking element, and made to write out one of Virgil’s Georgics on the morning of the school’s open day, 4 June. This involved copying out line after line of – as far as I was concerned – untranslatable Latin verse.
The real punishment was telling my parents. During the course of the 4 June celebrations, which I joined late after having completed my Georgic, Mum could hardly look at me, while Dad simply said, in a rather British way, that it would not be mentioned that day, but he would have a serious talk to me in the morning. When morning came he was nursing a hangover, and made rather a mess of it all.
The long-term consequences of my drugs bust, however, were wholly beneficial. This was the shock I needed. First, I knew that one more misdemeanour would mean curtains for my time at Eton. Next, I realised that I needed to stop moping about lagging behind my brother and make my own way. Crucially, instead of drifting academically I needed to make a greater effort. It was time to pull my finger out.
My O-level results were, for Eton, distinctly mediocre. But as soon as I got going in the lower sixth year – ‘B block’ at Eton – I was a student transformed. I loved my subjects (history, economics and history of art), I adored my teachers, and my results started to improve rapidly.
Great teachers are the secret to any great school, and Eton is particularly blessed. The reason for singling a few out is that they so inspired me – including when it came to politics – that they really changed my life.
Michael Kidson, a wood-block-throwing eccentric, was a superb history teacher who rejected all forms of Marxist determinism and unashamedly taught the ‘great men’ version of history. He brought the nineteenth century alive. Brilliant but biased, he thought Disraeli was an utter charlatan and all politicians after the fall of Lloyd George, with the exception of Churchill, pygmies. His love for Gladstone was such that when he read the account of the grand old man’s death in Philip Magnus’s biography, tears streamed down his cheeks.
But while history was a subject I loved, and history of art the one from which I remember most, it was economics and politics that really set me alight. Here was something that was relevant, exciting, intellectually stimulating, and really seemed to matter. Instead of learning about past problems, you could learn the tools to solve new ones. And this was the era of mass unemployment, high inflation and persistent British economic underperformance. More than almost anything, studying what has wrongly been called the dismal science put me on the path to a life in politics.
To me at least, right from the start it was the radical monetarists and free marketeers who seemed to have the new and exciting ideas. There was a radical Institute of Economic Affairs pamphlet we were encouraged to read, ‘What Price Unemployment?’, which rejected all the old ideas about pumping more government spending into the economy and trying to control wages and prices. I think we were told to read it so that we could critique what was seen at the time as dangerous nonsense. I thought it made pretty good sense.
And so the mediocre sixteen-year-old became a good enough pupil to be awarded an exhibition to Brasenose College, Oxford, in the autumn of 1985 to study politics, philosophy and economics.
There are moments of life you never forget, such as your wedding day and the birth of your first child. To them I would add another: if you are ever in the fortunate position of having one, an Oxbridge interview belongs with those indelible moments. I still shiver at the memory. Three badly dressed and dishevelled dons sitting in front of you and trying to work out whether you are just the product of a good education, or genuinely bright. They were pretty convinced that I was the former, and had a really good go at me.
‘Tell us which philosophers you have read.’ I reeled off the very few I had read something about: Marx, Descartes and John Stuart Mill. ‘Yes, and what others?’ They waited until I had got to the end of my list, then started grilling me on the last name I had thought of, Immanuel Kant. It was agony.
Where did my fascination with politics come from? There was certainly plenty of politics on both sides of the family. My mother’s forebears, ‘the Mounts of Wasing’, had served in Parliament for over a hundred years, starting off with a seat in the Isle of Wight before moving to Berkshire in the 1800s, where one of them became Newbury’s first MP in 1885.
But I don’t believe I inherited any political genes. I was influenced instead by what was happening as I came of age.
For anyone who was a teenager in the 1980s, the influence of ‘Mrs Thatcher’, as we always referred to her, was massive. You couldn’t be neutral about her. In simplistic terms, my generation was divided into those who hated her bourgeois capitalism, her slavish devotion to the US and the warmonger Ronald Reagan and her brutal suppression of the miners’ strike, and those who saw her as a brave fighter for economic and political freedom who was determined to modernise Britain and free us from the grip of over-mighty trade unions.
I was securely in the second camp. I believed that what was being done by Thatcher was essential.
In 1984 I took a year off between school and university, during which I worked in the House of Commons for my godfather, the Conservative MP Tim Rathbone. Tim was what was then called ‘a dripping wet’, a Tory opponent of Margaret Thatcher. He was a great lover of the Conservative Party, Parliament and public service, with a passion for Europe and our membership of what was then the EEC. He had a deep interest in reforming British drug policy and the provision of nursery education. He asked me to carry out research for him on these two subjects, which I found very stimulating.
As