"If you're leader, you've got to believe in something"

The headline-grabbing details emerging from Michael Ashcroft’s biography of David Cameron are, of course, a useful distraction for the government from too much attention being paid to the damage it is wreaking on Britain. Ashcroft and the Daily Mail want to hurt the Prime Minister but they don’t want to harm the Tories—and they’ve timed it brilliantly. With a bit of luck, they’ll be thinking, Cameron will resign earlier than he was intending, to be succeeded by Osborne/Johnson/May who will proceed to trounce Corbyn at the next election. Meanwhile, fun can be had by all, and serious stuff like people killing themselves because of the policies of the DWP or ludicrous decisions to build £24bn nuclear power plants can be safely buried. By the time the Tories have finished, a dead pig’s head may be an apt symbol for Britain. Maybe that’s the point: Cameron just wants to relive his youthful shenanigans, only on a larger, more grandly symbolic scale.

Still, while it may not be possible to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, the Ashcroft revelations do provide some useful insight into our esteemed Prime Minister. For example, we have discovered that Maggie Thatcher—the only Tory PM in living memory about whom there is not, thus far, any interesting sexual allegations—thought that Cameron was shallow: “If you’re leader, you’ve got to believe in something”, she is supposed to have said when musing on Dave’s abilities.

I’ve always thought this about Cameron. Essentially he’s just a smart but vacuous PR man. This is a man who is prepared to damage the Union for a short-term electoral advantage; to risk membership of the EU purely to strengthen his own position in the Conservative Party; to waffle on about the Big Society (or maybe that should be Pig Society?) for a bit, then forget about it, without anyone being much the wiser for what on earth he was going on about in the first place. I see lots of political calculations with Cameron, and a great deal of focus on presentation, but little of substance.

What does he believe? Probably not much. Cameron has admitted that his religious beliefs consist of a vague, loose and casual Anglicanism (which doesn’t stop him from wittering on about Britain having ‘Christian’ values), and I doubt there is anything more solid about his political beliefs. He is, after all, a man who has known privilege all his life; in so far as he has a vision, it has been forged in the ancient buildings of Eton and Oxford, in the riotous revels of the Bullingdon Club and the foxhunting and parties of Chipping Norton. He is essentially clueless about the experience of anyone other than members of a narrow social elite.

Cameron in his element

I suspect his principles amount to the following: inequality is natural, and so too is privilege; poverty is not good, but by and large it is the poor, rather than the wealthy, who need to take responsibility for their situation; that responsibility involves working hard, not complaining, and accepting that some people are privileged and that society is better off for it; those that don’t work hard or do complain deserve little sympathy.

I’ve often wondered why Cameron is in politics at all. No doubt he enjoys the kudos of being Prime Minister and the glamour of high office (his self-satisfied comment about the queen ‘purring’ at him down the phone seems to be evidence of this), and he will certainly be proud of his role in restoring, as he would see it, the Tories to their natural position of power. But whereas Thatcher, Blair and Brown all seemed driven to seize and hold onto office for as long as possible, Cameron’s calm announcement that he will be standing down before the next election indicates a strange lack of enthusiasm about his job.

Perhaps he sees being Prime Minister as something that will look good on his CV. I’m sure that I once read somewhere that George W. Bush believed that being President of the United States would improve his chances of getting the job he really wanted: Commissioner of Baseball. Maybe Cameron hopes that being Prime Minister is a good stepping stone to an office that he really wants. Something like Master of the Heythrop Hunt, possibly.