It was one of the most tumultuous summers in world politics since the end of the Second World War. David Cameron’s promise to give the public a vote on Europe triggered a bitterly fought referendum which ended on 23 June 2016 with Britain voting to leave the European Union. A few days later Cameron was gone and Theresa May was suddenly the new prime minister. In America, Donald Trump accepted the Republican Party’s nomination on the final day of the party’s convention in Cleveland. By mid-August the crisis in Ukraine had reached a pivotal point with Russian-backed forces preparing to cross the border to launch further military incursions. On 20 September, Russian warplanes bombed a UN convoy in Syria. A few days later the Islamic State sent bombers to Turkey to blow up the airport in Istanbul. But amid all the world chaos, pupils from a school in the south of England were quietly preparing for an educational trip of a lifetime.
In many ways it was no different to any school visit. The boys were told to wear smart dress and school ties. They would need plenty of spending money and were warned to be on their best behaviour as they would be ambassadors for the whole school. But in two vital respects this school excursion was very different indeed. The pupils in question were from Eton, invited to Moscow for a very private audience with the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin.
A secret meeting between pupils from the most elite school in the world and a former Russian spy chief was highly sensitive. The eleven sixth-formers sat around a marble table in a state room in the Kremlin and, with the help of translators, were invited to ask the Russian leader any questions they liked. In spite of the best efforts of the school and the Kremlin, news of the visit leaked, propelling the boys onto the front pages of the British and world media. Putin’s propaganda machine was quick to make political capital out of the world’s most famous school. Some boys were interviewed by RT, the English-language television station widely seen as the Kremlin’s propaganda channel, as well as the pro-government newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda. One boy was quoted as saying: ‘Our media present facts in Ukraine as being entirely Russia’s fault. They say that Ukrainians don’t want to have anything to do with Russians. So it’s interesting to talk to Ukrainian students here who have a different opinion and consider themselves Russians.’ On the subject of Syria, another boy reportedly told the paper: ‘Personally, I think that Putin is right to continue defending Assad in his role as president.’
Back home the boys’ visit attracted condemnation and admiration in equal measure. Chris Bryant, the Labour MP and former government minister, said: ‘There’s a dangerous myth abroad in some right-wing circles that Putin has been a bit hard done by. That other Etonian Boris Johnson seems to think we should press the reset button with Russia. But let’s not forget the Russian state had one man killed on British soil, Alexander Litvinenko, and another who worked for a UK firm, Sergei Magnitsky… We should work with Europe to strengthen our common position over Russia, not undermine it.’1 (Events in Salisbury 18 months later when a Russian spy and his daughter were victims of a chemical weapons attack have proved Bryant right.)
Others had to acknowledge that the boys had pulled off something of a coup, securing a one-to-one, two-hour meeting with Putin, and scooping their own newly elected prime minister, Theresa May, who had yet to arrange her own visit to the Kremlin. Chief executives of some of the world’s biggest companies can spend months, perhaps years, waiting for a call from the Kremlin.
Back in Berkshire, the Eton College authorities were seriously concerned about the visit. The Kremlin-orchestrated media appearances had made the boys look naive and foolish. More concerning was the impression that Eton was somehow abusing its privilege by using soft power to trespass on the diplomatic stage. Putin’s claim that he agreed to the audience because the school had educated nineteen British prime ministers only heightened the embarrassment. The boys had broken the school’s unwritten rule that the only time an Etonian should have his name appear in the paper was at his birth, marriage or death – unless of course the coverage enhanced the standing of the school.
In a desperate attempt to distance Eton from the Kremlin the school issued a terse statement: ‘This was a private visit by a small group of boys organised entirely at their own initiative and independently of the college.’
Eton’s circumspect approach to the visit was telling. It exposed the sensitive path that Britain’s most famous and exclusive private school has to tread in the twenty-first century. Any impression that the visit had nothing to do with the school, or indeed that any other school could have pulled off such a feat, is risible. So while it may have been true that the boys’ trip was not officially sanctioned, the school was being disingenuous in playing down the Eton name which had made it possible.
And the connection between Moscow and Eton is much closer than many people realise. The school proudly exhibits in its ancient Cannon Square a sixty-four-pounder Russian gun captured by British soldiers at the Battle of Sevastopol during the Crimean War in 1854. Eton is the teacher of choice for the children of Russian oligarchs, who must implicitly support Putin or face ruin. One in ten boys at the school learns Russian and a disproportionate number of British ambassadors to Moscow are Old Etonians. More significantly, a few months before the Putin meeting, a charismatic Russian monk had been invited to Eton to talk to the boys.
Father Tikhon Shevkunov presides over a Russian Christian Orthodox monastery located close to the headquarters of the FSB, successor to the feared KGB. As Putin’s personal spiritual adviser, he accompanies the Russian leader on diplomatic missions. His beard and long hair lend a passing resemblance to the American actor Russell Crowe, although there have been the inevitable comparisons with Rasputin, the mad monk who held sway in the court of the Tsars. It is not clear who invited the cleric to Eton but Father Tikhon says his visit was approved by the provost after some of the boys had read his book, Everyday Saints and Other Stories, a surprising bestseller.
Recalling his time at Eton, Father Tikhon says:
I was given a very warm reception; after the lecture I was asked many questions about the history of Russia, about its present, about Russian and English literature and culture, and of course, about the faith, about Orthodoxy. At the end of the meeting the lads asked me whether I could help them make a visit to Russia. I answered that of course I would gladly give them hospitality in Moscow and in Sretensky Monastery. Then they asked if they could meet with President Putin. The question was unexpected, to say the least. I answered that fulfilling their request would not be a simple matter. The boys asked me, ‘What do we need to do for this?’ I replied, ‘You need to do what anyone does when they want to meet with someone they don’t know: write him a letter and ask for a meeting.’ The lads wrote a very polite and sincere letter, and I gave it to the International department of the President’s Administration.2
He says that at all times Eton College was kept informed of the progress of the boys’ request:
Immediately after I learned of the young men’s desire to visit Russia and meet with our president, I informed the Eton College administration of it. I asked permission of the college provost to give the students’ letter to the President’s Administration, and permission was granted. After some time had passed, when a preliminary positive reply concerning the meeting had come from the Russian side, the ambassador of the Russian Federation in Great Britain A.V. Yakovenko informed the provost of Eton on its progress. The Eton administration reviewed two possible variations of the students’ visit – either as personal, or as an official delegation. The final verdict was that they would not be sending an official delegation. When the students heard about this they said, ‘Then we’ll go on our own.’ That is how they came to Russia.3
It was a version of events confirmed by the Kremlin in an official statement.
Before the boys set out, they were advised by a former Etonian master on how to negotiate the politics of the meeting. Peter Reznikov had been a Russian government interpreter before taking up a teaching post at Eton, which he held for seventeen years. This was a man who once claimed young Etonians believed he was a trained-to-kill colonel in the FSB under Putin’s command. He suggested the boys ask questions ‘in the friendliest manner possible – and not to annoy the president… I suggested they ask Putin about when Russian–British relations would start warming up, and what needs to be done for it to happen.’
There is a long tradition at Eton of pupil-led societies. Boys learn to arrange events, write letters of invitation to potential guests and, more importantly, use family or other contacts to bring in prominent speakers. The footballer Gianfranco Zola and the novelist Jeffrey Archer were among the boys’ guests in the weeks before the Moscow visit. There is an understanding, however, that society events happen at the school and in term time. The Times described the boys’ ‘chutzpah’ as ‘very Etonian’.4 Afterwards, several of the boys uploaded to social media images of them talking to Mr Putin. David Wei, from Shanghai, wrote that it took ‘ten months, 1,040 emails, 1,000 text messages, countless sleepless nights’ to organise the trip while studying for A-levels. After ‘checking in’ to the Kremlin’s Facebook app, he posted: ‘Guys, we truly gave Putin a deep impression of us and he responded by showing us his human face.’
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Thirty-one years earlier, in 1985, another Eton schoolboy had visited Russia before going to Oxford to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics. His name was David Cameron and he was travelling around the Crimea with a school friend. The arrival of two schoolboys in Russia on a gap-year break wouldn’t have normally interested the Soviet authorities, but the fact that Cameron and his friend were Etonians gave the visit special significance and two KGB spies were despatched to the region’s capital to make contact with the boys. The naive Cameron and his chum were happy to make friends with the spies and willingly accepted the KGB’s hospitality. They were treated to lunch and dinner and asked about life in England and what they thought about the government. It was only when Cameron discussed the strange encounter with a tutor at Oxford that he realised that he had probably been targeted by the KGB.5 It makes sense. After all, the KGB had enjoyed much success recruiting spies and double agents who had recently left English public schools and were on their way to Oxbridge.
The most famous of such operations was the Cambridge Spy Ring. Anthony Blunt (Marlborough), Guy Burgess (Eton), Donald Maclean (Gresham’s) and Kim Philby (Westminster) may have gone to different public schools but they moved in the same social and business circles and shared the same communist sympathies. Using their public school and university connections, the Cambridge spies effortlessly secured jobs at the BBC, MI5, MI6, and, in Anthony Blunt’s case, even a posting at the heart of the royal family itself.
Loyalty to Britain is perhaps the most hallowed tenet of the public school ethos. The Queen is regarded with a special reverence by those who have been educated privately, partly because the royal family all went to public schools where they continue to serve as official patrons. Betrayal of Queen and country is regarded as the greatest toff crime of them all. Blunt, Burgess, Maclean and Philby knew this, and although each of them had their own reasons for betraying their country, they also knew their crimes would mean their names would live on in posterity.
The ongoing quest for an everlasting place in history is beaten into the hearts of all public school pupils and this egocentrism played straight into the hands of the Soviets. It allowed the Kremlin to ruthlessly exploit a system that educated almost the entire British establishment. Why waste time and valuable resources recruiting further down Britain’s rigid class ladder when the public schools delivered access to the top on a plate?
The KGB’s pragmatic obsession with Old Etonians during the Cold War was no different to Putin’s fascination with the eleven schoolboys he had agreed to meet in August 2016. And when David Cameron and his fellow Etonian friend arrived in the Crimea in 1985, looking distinctly out of place on a gap-year break, it is hardly surprising that the KGB tried to recruit them.
As it turned out they were really on to something. David Cameron’s effortless rise from home counties prep school to become the nineteenth Etonian prime minister was proof that the Kremlin’s foreign-agent recruitment policy was sound. The Soviets might have also noted that between 1900 and 1979 almost a quarter (333) of government ministers (1,489) were educated at Eton.6
Cameron’s rise from riches to power is a parable of our times. It lays bare a system in which, for the right price and a little insider dealing, a ‘good’ school can propel a schoolboy or a schoolgirl to the highest echelons of society in a very short time. Born the third of four children on 9 October 1966, Cameron spent the first three years of his life in Kensington and Chelsea before the family moved to an old rectory near Newbury in Berkshire. His mother, Mary, served as a Justice of the Peace for thirty years and his father, Ian, was a City stockbroker who in April 2016 was found to have run an offshore fund called Blairmore Holdings that avoided having to pay tax in Britain.7 The Cameron family wealth had been established by David Cameron’s great-great-grandfather, Alexander Geddes, who had made a fortune in Chicago trading in grain before returning to Scotland in the 1880s where he built the ancestral home, Blairmore House. Another great-great-grandfather was Sir Ewen Cameron, London manager of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, who helped the Rothschild banking dynasty sell war bonds during the Russo-Japanese conflict of 1904–5. But the Cameron family’s business dealings belie the family’s aristocratic connections.
His maternal great-grandfather was Sir William Mount, 1st Baronet, who died ‘while crossing a meadow at Aldermaston riding with the South Berks hounds from his residence at Wasing Place’, a Grade II-listed mansion in Berkshire.8 There are even direct royal claims that show he is the great-great-great-great-great-grandson of King William IV, albeit via a royal mistress, which supposedly makes him a fifth cousin, twice removed, of the Queen. Not only this, but his father-in-law’s family once owned Buckingham House before selling it to George III for £21,000.
Cameron’s education followed the same pattern as that of other children of the English upper-middle classes. The question of schooling was settled long before he was born based on an unshakeable trust in the most famous public schools in England. In accordance with family tradition, Cameron was sent to a country pre-prep school as the first step in the procession to Eton. He lived at home and was ferried to school in a lift-share arrangement with the select group of other mums whose children attended the same school.9 According to Michael Ashcroft and Isobel Oakeshott’s biography of Cameron, ‘He had total stability and appeared to want for nothing, either emotionally or materially.’10 It was a world to which only a tiny proportion of the population can relate: ‘He is a real, proper Englishman, who would love to defend what he sees as the real England, but his real England is different to almost everyone else’s,’ said a childhood friend.11
At the age of seven, Cameron was packed off to Heatherdown, an exclusive preparatory school. It was a small school of just eighty pupils with an unusually short history – established in 1902 and forced to close in 1982. But in the sixty-odd years before David Cameron attended, it had proved itself a reliable feeder for Eton.
Cameron’s classmates included the grandson of the oil billionaire John Paul Getty and Prince Edward. By rubbing shoulders with the really rich and genuinely regal, a place at Heatherdown guaranteed success in life. How many other parent–teacher associations can call on the monarch to help out with the school fete?
Most of Cameron’s class of 1978 went on to enjoy brilliant and rewarding careers in the City. Peter Romilly made his fortune specialising in the futures and derivatives markets.12 Edward Mallinckrodt, who came top of the form and went on to study at Eton with Cameron, was named a Global Leader of Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum in 2001.13 Others followed Cameron’s path. Viscount Giles Goschen was briefly a transport minister in John Major’s government at the age of twenty-nine and the youngest hereditary peer elected to the House of Lords by any party at just thirty-four in 1999. Others were straightforward aristocrats who left school to return to the stewardship of their titles and estates. They included the Honourable Charles Bruce, a descendant of Robert the Bruce and heir to the 11th Earl of Elgin. It was the 7th Earl of Elgin who had seized the marbles from the Parthenon in Greece and brought them to Britain.
The Camerons had registered David and his brother Alex (now a successful QC) on the so-called Eton List which effectively allowed an Old Etonian (OE) to sew up a place for his son while the boy was in nappies.14 By the time Cameron took his place at the school in 1979 more than half of the pupils had fathers who were OEs. There was still the small matter of the Eton entrance exam, a far less challenging examination than it is now. Cameron passed, though he was not bright enough to secure a King’s Scholarship, nor did he qualify for inclusion on the second tier of gifted scholars.15
Cameron followed his brother to Eton in 1979, the year Margaret Thatcher stormed to power and the year the Jam’s hit single ‘Eton Rifles’ dominated the charts. Cameron later said he loved the song, much to the consternation of the band’s songwriter Paul Weller, who had used Eton as a metaphor for class war.
The financial cost of all the Cameron children’s education was a mere afterthought, although it would have set the family back £5,000 a year (now more than £40,000) for each boy, minus a sibling reduction. Cameron’s two sisters Clare and Tania boarded at St Mary’s Calne, where fees are now among the most expensive in the country at £37,500 a year.
Academically, Cameron was a slow developer, passing a clutch of unspectacular O-levels before achieving three As at A-level, in History, History of Art and Economics with Politics. Unlike his brother Alex and older pupil Boris Johnson, he was not invited into the Pop society, who were worshipped by the junior boys and wore a very distinctive uniform of black tailcoat with braid piping, spongebag trousers in a houndstooth check, and a starched wing collar with a white bow tie – hand-tied of course.16 It has been said that Cameron felt his failure to win a place in Pop spurred him on in later life and made membership of the notorious Bullingdon and Piers Gaveston societies at Oxford so appealing. But an Eton education amounts to so much more than academic qualifications or esoteric societies. It provides a very exclusive social marketplace for the rich and famous. The price of entrance is reassuringly expensive because it continues to dominate a premier league of English public schools which guarantee success. The only reason Eton does not expressly indemnify against failure is because the school’s non-academic results emphatically speak for themselves – nineteen prime ministers is only a headline figure.
Cameron’s headmaster at Eton was Eric Anderson, the teacher who had mentored Tony Blair at Fettes and taught Prince Charles at Gordonstoun. Like Blair, Cameron is effusive in his praise for the role Anderson played in shaping his ambitions and saving his school career. He had almost been expelled in 1984 after being caught taking cannabis: seven boys were removed in a scandal that exposed a wider drug culture at the school than anyone had realised. It was Anderson who brought Cameron back from the abyss and saved his education.17
After Cameron became prime minister a photograph emerged of his Eton peer group. His forty-five housemates and housemaster are pictured in 1984 in white bow-tie uniform arranged in four tiers and squinting into the sun. It could have been taken at any time in the previous 200 years. Notably there is not a single black or brown face among them. The vast majority of the boys who gathered on that warm June afternoon to pose for their picture followed in the fine traditions of Eton and became leaders of men or high achievers in their chosen field – bankers, journalists, entrepreneurs. But there are certain well-regarded professions that are, shall we say, very conspicuous by their absence. There are no scientists, inventors, doctors, probation officers, police officers or social workers. Only one of the forty-six found a job serving the local community: Benjamin Bellak trained to be a teacher and took a job at his local comprehensive school in south London. But even he eventually returned to the private fold. He now teaches at Cranleigh School in Surrey where boarding fees are over £36,600 a year.
Missing from the picture was Hugh Powell, whose father was Margaret Thatcher’s foreign-policy adviser at the time. An aspiring journalist on the Eton College Chronicle, Powell was looking for a story that would get him noticed. His father suggested he write to the prime minister. Interestingly, the resulting interview focused not on Thatcherism but private education:
Powell: You sent your own son to a public school, which suggests that you believe in the public school system. Do you think it will continue to have a role in the Britain of the future?
Thatcher: Yes, people have the right to choose private education and if the public schools offer what parents want for their children then they will continue to flourish. But as someone who believes in competition I look forward to seeing the state schools increasing the pressure of excellence. My hope is that people will become less concerned with status and more concerned with performance.
Powell’s follow-up question implied he was critical of the system that had served his family so well, when he asked whether public schools needed major changes to prepare their pupils for public service. Thatcher appeared to agree, saying that ‘we need changes in the qualifications of those who enter the public service, with many more technically qualified people. I hope that the public schools will contribute to producing more such people rather than generalists.’18
Powell also asked the prime minister’s advice on becoming a career politician but Thatcher told him she distrusted ‘the professional politician who has never done anything else’, adding that ‘too often they are preoccupied with theories of politics and with manipulating people rather than bringing practical experience to bear on everyday problems.’
The tabloids had a field day and the article was carried by a number of national newspapers, although the world was blissfully unaware of how an Eton schoolboy had secured an exclusive interview with the prime minister. To Powell’s mind he had achieved everything he had set out to and was able to use the interview to burnish his CV. This is confirmed by the thank-you letter he wrote to Thatcher, gleefully telling her that the interview had ‘generated more interest and controversy than any Chronicle in the last one hundred years’. He had also gone one better than Cameron who, the previous year, had approached his cousin Ferdinand Mount, then head of Thatcher’s Policy Unit, to try to bag an interview for himself. But he was rebuffed on the grounds that his cousin was too busy writing Thatcher’s Conservative Party Conference speech.19
Cameron and Powell were destined to meet again when, unsurprisingly, they both found themselves in top government jobs. While Cameron was working his way to Downing Street, Powell was forging a career in the top ranks of the Civil Service. By 2014 he was Cameron’s deputy national security adviser. Their long-standing friendship only became public when in March of that year Powell was put under the spotlight, photographed outside Downing Street with an official briefing note sticking out of his bundle of papers. It was at the height of the Ukraine crisis and the British government was carefully and secretly weighing up its options. Caught by a long-lens camera, Powell’s briefing note declared that ‘Britain should not, for now… close London’s financial centre to Russians.’
The diplomatic blunder made front-page news, which many interpreted as proof that the billionaire oligarchs were getting exactly what they wanted for their generous donations to the Conservative Party. It was doubly embarrassing for Cameron, who now faced calls from politicians to sack the old school chum he had appointed to a top job a few weeks earlier.20
The Eton College house photograph only gives a narrow snapshot of the many OEs who would have cause to know David Cameron. Such is the intense camaraderie between boys who share the Eton experience that the bonds between them are unbreakable. They have spent five long years living together, growing up together, sharing intimate personal details and personal tragedy. They regard the school as their family. And after school they go to the same universities and later secure elevated and influential positions. It means OEs tend to bump into each other much more than most schoolboys do in their professional lives. Moreover, they are encouraged to seek each other out in society. One of the world’s most precious networking tools is the Eton database held by the school and available to every former pupil – for a membership fee.21
Similar membership lists are carefully collated and mined by other public schools. Merchant Taylors’ School sets out how its ‘careers directory’ operates with this explanation: ‘This tool enables OMTs to contact fellow alumni who work in a particular field or industry for careers advice and information. The service has proven to be extremely successful and a real benefit to our more recent leavers who can easily access the knowledge and experience of their predecessors as they make decisions about their own careers. We’re delighted that so many guests who attended the City Network have volunteered to be added to the directory, and also to return to school to give careers advice to the current boys.’22
Over the years OEs have found subtle ways of identifying each other beyond the accent and the tie. An Etonian greeting between two men who suspect they were educated at the same place is: ‘Did you go to school?’ The implication being there is only one school worth going to. How irresistibly tempting and convenient it must be for all these captains of industry, deal makers, lobbyists, PR men and movers and shakers across the establishment to help each other up the greasy pole. Yet it is impossible to say exactly how much influence a school like Eton can bring to bear. Impossible to count how many occasions it has literally been a case of jobs for the boys. Well, almost impossible. In the schooling and political career of David Cameron many of these associations are exposed.
After school, Cameron spent his gap year garnishing a CV that would open doors to politics and the City. He spent three months as a researcher for his godfather, Tim Rathbone (Eton), the Conservative MP for Lewes, and attended debates in the House of Commons. Through his father he was handed a six-month spell working for Jardine Matheson, a Bermuda-registered trading conglomerate, in Hong Kong. The company was run by an old family friend, Sir Henry Keswick (Eton), who offered Cameron a place on the company’s training scheme after he graduated. Keswick later donated £100,000 to the Conservative & Unionist Party in the 2017 general election.
Cameron showed little interest in politics at Oxford but he did throw himself into the traditional public displays of privilege, joining the Bullingdon and Piers Gaveston clubs whose memberships are exclusively taken from the public schools, especially Eton. The rituals, which include smashing up restaurants and running riot through the city streets, are largely based on the behaviour of the pupil-run societies that dominated the ungoverned public schools of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today, it is said that a prospective Bullingdon Club member must burn a fifty pound note in front of a homeless person.
Hooliganism and vandalism are part of the club’s raison d’être. In 1894, after dinner, Bullingdon members smashed the lights and 468 windows in Peckwater Quad of Christ Church, along with the blinds and doors of the building. This was repeated in 1927. In 1987 Cameron and Boris Johnson were part of a group of ‘Bullers’ who broke off their dinner in an Oxford restaurant to throw a pot through one of its windows. According to Cameron biographers Francis Elliott and James Hanning, Johnson was one of the members subsequently arrested and detained overnight by the police. More recently, in 2004 drunken ‘Bullers’ took to smashing crockery and wine bottles in a local pub. An attempt to pay for the damage with a cheque was rebuffed by the landlord and instead four of the group were arrested and slapped with penalty notices after a night in the cells.
In response to the 2011 London riots, Cameron had made much political play of saying that the offenders must be dealt with firmly. Asked by Evan Davis on the Today programme whether he could see any likeness between the rioters and members of the Bullingdon Club, Cameron said: ‘We all do stupid things when we’re young. And I think that’s clear. But I think what we saw in terms of the riots was actually very well organised, in many cases, looting and stealing and thieving.’23 Both events resulted in criminal damage and people put in fear for their personal safety. If anything, the Oxford rioting was better organised, and the offenders’ private wealth presumably meant theft wasn’t a priority.
There are many more societies and unofficial groupings that are governed by the rituals, argot and traditions of the public schools which continue to flourish at university. For example, the Stoics, an Oxford club, observes such a high degree of secrecy that public school undergraduates have to swear an oath never to admit to being a member. Nearly all of these clubs exclude women and many revolve around deeply antisocial behaviour. Piers Gaveston is best known today for a particularly sordid incident allegedly featuring David Cameron and a dead pig’s head.24 For state-educated boys and girls who only encounter the privately educated at university, this behaviour can be both intimidating and unfathomable. But far more harm is caused by behaviour that is simply imperceptible to the uninitiated.
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After graduating from Oxford with a first-class honours degree Cameron faced an enviable career choice – wealth or power. Within a few weeks he was interviewed by Alistair Cooke (Framlingham), then deputy director of the Conservatives’ research department. According to a number of reports, shortly before the interview took place Cooke received a phone call from Buckingham Palace. The male caller stated: ‘I understand 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.’25
Whether he needed a leg-up in this way is debatable. Cameron was already well connected in the party through his cousin Ferdinand Mount. He had also transferred his allegiance from school and university societies to the gentlemen’s clubs of London, which help to keep public schoolboys in touch with each other after university. Cameron’s father was chairman of the most exclusive of them all, White’s. Founded in 1693, its members include Prince Charles, Prince William, the disgraced media mogul Conrad Black, Geordie Greig (Eton), editor of the Mail on Sunday, and Norman Lamont (Loretto). Churchill’s imposter friend Brendan Bracken, who tricked his way into high society, was also a member, as was Oswald Mosley (Winchester). Membership is exclusively male and public school. To become a member of White’s, your proposer must write your name in a leather-bound book. Thirty-five other members must sign to secure your place; those who oppose may scrawl ‘never’.26
Cameron was offered a researcher’s post on the paltry starting salary of £10,000. But his private means meant he was able to move into an apartment in the exclusive Harrington Gardens in Kensington with his old friend, the film producer Peter Czernin, an heir to the Howard de Walden fortune.27 It was in the Conservatives research department that he met George Osborne (St Paul’s), who would go on to be his chancellor and closest political ally.
Other colleagues, who collectively became known as the ‘brat pack’, were Steve Hilton (Christ’s Hospital), one of Cameron’s closest strategy advisers during his early days in Downing Street, and Hilton’s future wife Rachel Whetstone (Benenden) who later left the UK to run Google’s communications unit. But it was Cameron’s Eton friend Ed Llewellyn, two years above him and in the same year as Boris Johnson, whom the future prime minister relied on as his closest confidant and subsequently made his chief of staff. Osborne also opted for an OE as his chief of staff, former head boy Rupert Harrison.
This clique of Young Turk Tories worked and played together. They even holidayed together. Among their number were Michael Gove (Robert Gordon’s), Chris Lockwood (St Paul’s) as well as journalists and PR gurus including Robert Hardman and Matthew D’Ancona (St Dunstan’s).28 They met whenever the occasion allowed, including hunt meets in Devon and then near Chipping Norton, where the Camerons later moved.29 Most of the group were invited to Cameron’s wedding to Samantha (St Helen and St Katharine, and Marlborough College).30
This band of policy researchers and advisers secured a velvet revolution in the leadership and direction of the new Conservative Party. Many of their seniors had either attended the same schools and clubs or knew people who had. Some may have been part of the Masonic societies organised by most famous public schools under the aegis of the Public School Lodges’ Council. Cameron’s own career was boosted when he became adviser to the chancellor of the exchequer, fellow White’s member Norman Lamont.
It was around this time Cameron committed himself to entering Parliament, but was told that he first needed experience outside of politics. Once again family and school contacts came to the rescue. Cameron’s mother-in-law, Annabel Astor, regularly entertained guests at her remote holiday home in Jura. One guest, the self-made millionaire Michael Green, who ran Carlton Communications, liked to arrive by helicopter.31 When she heard her son-in-law was looking for a plumb job out of politics she called Green, who quickly ended Cameron’s short search for employment.32
In 1994 Cameron took up an £80,000-a-year job working as Green’s right-hand man. He thrived at Carlton and used his new-found influence to help his network by bringing in people like Rachel Whetstone to high-powered positions. When Baron Beaverbrook (Charterhouse), for whom he had written speeches, asked if his daughter could do some work experience at Carlton he arranged that too.33
Although he prospered at Carlton, Cameron kept his eye firmly on the main prize – a parliamentary seat. So, to the dismay of Green, he left the company to begin a round of applications for Tory seats. For the first time in his career he found his Eton background worked against him as Conservative Party associations found he came over too much as a Tory toff. He was rebuffed in Ashford, Reading and Epsom.34 It was the only time his Eton education stood in his way.
He was finally successful in Stafford. In the general election of 1997 Cameron called in some favours and persuaded a number of Tory big guns, including Michael Heseltine, to visit the constituency. But he still lost the seat to Labour by more than 4,000 votes. Undaunted, he returned to Carlton while continuing to look for another winnable seat. He eventually found it in Witney, where the oratory skills he’d developed at Eton set him apart from the other candidates and saw him win the Oxfordshire seat in the general election of 2001.
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In the aftermath of a second Labour victory the Conservative leader, William Hague, resigned. As old Tory hands including Kenneth Clarke and Michael Portillo jostled for the Conservative crown, Cameron even contemplated throwing his own hat into the ring. It was of course an absurd idea as he had been in parliament for less than six months, but Cameron’s ambition knew no bounds.35 Cameron bided his time and primed his powerbase. As the party floundered under Iain Duncan Smith and then Michael Howard, Cameron formed a strong partnership with George Osborne, who had joined him among the 2001 Commons intake. Their schooling and family background (Osborne’s father was a baronet) made them perfect bedfellows.
Since many of the Cameron and Osborne group had substantial homes among the leafy Georgian terraces of west London, they became known as the Notting Hill set. All of them were privately educated and most had gone to Oxford. Cameron’s network of supporters and advisers who had access to plenty of cash (David Feldman stomped up £20,000 for a sumptuous launch event) worked closely with his friends in the media, the Independent’s Bruce Anderson (Campbell College, Northern Ireland’s most prestigious public school) and The Times’ Daniel Finkelstein (University College School), who talked up Cameron’s chances. He went on to win the 2005 Tory leadership election, a turn of events which some described as an Etonian putsch.
Going into the 2010 election the Tories lagged behind Labour in the polls. There were many in the Tory Party who thought it impossible that Britain would elect an OE as its next prime minister. To win over the electorate and end Labour’s thirteen years in power he would need to broaden his appeal. Crucial to his success would be the Tory press and the most influential media moguls in the country: Rupert Murdoch (Geelong Grammar School, Australia’s most expensive boarding school), Paul Dacre (state scholarship at University College School), and his much younger boss and owner of the Mail titles, Lord Rothermere (Gordonstoun).
Cameron, of course, already had the right contacts in place. The editor of The Sun, Rebekah Wade, was married to Charlie Brooks, an Old Etonian friend of Cameron’s brother Alex. In 2009 the Brooks had moved close to Cameron’s constituency home in Oxfordshire and they became frequent guests at each other’s parties.36 Soon, according to evidence given by Kenneth Clarke to the media select committee in 2017, Cameron and Osborne had the ear of Murdoch, his media executive son James (Horace Mann, the most exclusive school in New York) and PR tycoon Matthew Freud (Westminster). Before the 2010 election was called, Cameron could count on The Sun, News of the World and to a lesser extent The Times.
The wooing of Dacre proved more challenging as the long-standing editor is renowned for maintaining a cordial distance between his paper and the politicians he may end up stabbing in the front and back. But Dacre, who was by no means ill-disposed to Cameron’s Etonian background, having sent his own sons there, eventually came round. The Telegraph, a natural Cameron cheerleader, fell into line.
The 2010 election result was not enough to beat Labour outright but Cameron managed to seize the initiative by wooing Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg (Westminster) to form a coalition. The politicos were astonished: the Lib Dems had spent their whole careers opposing the Tories. A Lib Dem–Labour coalition had seemed inevitable. How did Cameron pull it off?
The natural chemistry between the Clegg and Cameron teams may have stemmed from a shared background. In the Clegg corner there was Chris Huhne (also Westminster), Danny Alexander (Lochaber High School, where former Lib Dem leader Charles Kennedy was also educated) and David Laws (St George’s College, Weybridge) while Cameron wheeled out Osborne (St Paul’s), Ed Llewellyn (Eton, and a family friend of the Cleggs) and Oliver Letwin (Eton). For the first time in their political lives these men were in touching distance of power, which would mark the end of their quest from playground to high office. They almost fell over each other in the rush to shake hands.
There are many who believe that Cameron, Osborne and Clegg were only interested in power for power’s sake. Say Ashcroft and Oakeshott: ‘Within [Cameron’s] own party, a narrative was emerging that, having got the top job, he had achieved all he wanted.’ Later on, one of Osborne’s favourite responses to political trouble was reportedly: ‘Oh look, it’s all a game.’37 For those who have been educated at Eton or St Paul’s, that rings true. The trouble is the stakes are so much higher when you are playing with people’s jobs and families.
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Inside Downing Street, Cameron wasted no time gathering around him a clique of old school friends and members of his tight network of supporters. Some were elected, some not. Soon, key government decisions were being taken in the marble-topped kitchens of west London and rubber-stamped as an afterthought by the cabinet. Ministers and civil servants, who felt excluded from government, suspected that it was unhealthy to run Britain in such a narrow echo chamber.38
Helen Ghosh, a former Home Office permanent secretary, said that women were conspicuous by their absence from Cameron’s executive decision-making club, which she described as an ‘Etonian clique’. There were plenty of promoted OEs to support Ghosh’s claim. Boris Johnson’s brother Jo Johnson was appointed head of Cameron’s Downing Street Policy Unit, while Oliver Letwin was put in charge of developing cabinet policy. There were also key appointments outside government in Cameron’s gift to OEs. The Etonian son of his old headmaster, Eric Anderson, was made the independent reviewer of terrorism laws.39 By 2014, concern over the number of Etonians at the heart of government had become so serious that Cameron’s ally, Michael Gove, told the Financial Times that the numbers of Eton-educated advisers was ‘ridiculous and preposterous’.40
Gove, godfather to one of Cameron’s children, was the first Conservative education minister to send his child to a state secondary school and publicly argues that twenty-first-century prime ministers should be choosing from a much wider talent pool. Unfortunately, when, as education secretary, he came under pressure to introduce a free school meal policy for poor children, instead of commissioning a report from someone who’d already worked on the issue, he gave the job to Henry Dimbleby (Eton), son of veteran broadcaster David, whom he had bumped into on holiday in Marrakech.
In the run-up to the 2015 general election David Cameron agreed to be interviewed by the BBC in his Cotswold kitchen. The whole Cameron family was present and the idea was that it should be less formal than some of the other set-piece interviews he had done with the broadcast media. Cameron and his advisers hoped it would soften his image and show the prime minister to be more ordinary, portraying him as a loyal husband and devoted father.
The choice of who should conduct the interview was crucial. The man selected for the job was James Landale, the then deputy political editor of the BBC. The two men had met many times when Landale was reporting on politics. But there was also something much deeper about their acquaintance. Both men were near contemporaries at Eton. They also shared an interest in the Hong Kong-based trading conglomerate Jardine Matheson: Landale’s ancestor was the 13th Tai-pan of Jardine Matheson & Co. and member of the Executive Council and Legislative Council of Hong Kong.
A BBC film crew had spent a relaxed week filming Cameron cheering on his son Elwen’s football team, shopping in the local butcher’s shop and preparing food in the kitchen of his Oxfordshire home. It was while Cameron was at home with Samantha and his children that Landale had popped him that now famous fatal question and asked him how long he was planning to serve as prime minister.
It was a question that a politician as street savvy as Cameron should have been able to bat away with ease. Instead he answered honestly that, should he win the election he had no intention of serving a third term. It may have been said to honour a pledge he had made to his wife, and her presence during the interview made the question difficult to avoid. Or he may have thought that he was unlikely to win a second term and was planning to stand down shortly anyway.
Whatever the reason for this apparently off-the-cuff remark it was to alter the course of British history. Its most immediate impact was to make Cameron vulnerable to a leadership challenge from an emboldened Boris Johnson. It kick-started a fourteen-month Tory leadership race which turned the Referendum campaign into a beauty contest to choose his successor. Cameron had gambled that he would win the EU referendum, like he had successfully gambled on the Scottish referendum, and Boris, in so many ways a europhile, had gambled that he stood a much better chance of succeeding his school friend as prime minister if he threw his weight behind Brexit. It was all part of the game, not just within politics, but in the Conservative Party, and the public school clique within it.
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After the Tories won an outright majority in the 2015 general election, 53 per cent of Cameron’s reshuffled cabinet had been educated at an independent school at some point in their life.41 Under Cameron’s leadership, the country appeared to be run as an extension of his old school.42 This may not have been what Cameron or his advisers, partners and hangers-on intended or believed they were doing. Nevertheless, this was the widely held perception, one which was predicated on some uncomfortable truths.
In late 2015, Boris Johnson, then London mayor, drew up proposals that would have helped the city’s black-cab drivers fight back against the growing number of private-hire cars using Uber. But three months later he dropped several of the most controversial ideas, including forcing customers to wait for five minutes between requesting a car and beginning a journey. The London cabbies claimed that Johnson had been leaned on by Cameron and his advisers, one of whom was then working for Uber. The saga left a bad taste and raised questions about whether Cameron’s close-knit circle of friends was acting in the best interests of the country.43 Worse still, Cameron was also accused of trying to cover up allegations of serious crime among his friends.
Patrick Rock, who was a close friend of both David Cameron and Ed Llewellyn long before he became a key Number 10 adviser, resigned as deputy director of the Downing Street Policy Unit in February 2014 as a result of a police investigation into child pornography allegations. Rock was given a two-year conditional discharge after downloading indecent pictures of scantily clad girls as young as ten in sexual poses. Before his arrest, he had been responsible for developing government policy to require internet companies to fit anti-porn filters as standard.44
It later emerged that the police investigation into Rock had been kept quiet by Downing Street, who were keen to keep Rock’s name out of the public eye. The situation was made worse when it was revealed that he had previously been the subject of a complaint of harassment – an allegation that had been investigated by his friend Llewellyn. Downing Street denied any cover-up but the perception that Cameron was guilty of favourable treatment for his friends persisted throughout his premiership.
When Cameron resigned in the wake of the EU referendum the scale of this protection, patronage and preferment was laid bare. Almost all those featured in his list of resignation honours had begun their journey at public school. Some are very conscious of this unseen advantage and try to hide their private education – the CVs and LinkedIn profiles of Cameron’s special advisers often leave out the name of their school.
While many of these were names already in the public domain and had led to claims that Cameron ran his government as a ‘chumocracy’, there were others who weren’t.45 By scratching the backs of so many of his network, Cameron had inadvertently exposed the incestuousness of public school associates.46
One of the most revealing was the patronage bestowed on Nicholas Howard, Cameron’s assistant private secretary, given an OBE. His name or position is hardly known outside Westminster. He is the son of Michael Howard, who’d mentored Cameron when he was home secretary. In 1993, Howard, a grammar schoolboy, provoked a wave of criticism when he sent his son to Eton after saying he did not think a Pimlico school near where the Howards lived would be good enough.47
The most brazen appointment of all was that of Laura Wyld, who was given a peerage by herself as head of the prime minister’s Appointments Unit. Such a blatant round of self-serving patronage and advancement to a very narrow group of friends and advisers prompted bitter criticism. The then Lib Dem leader Tim Farron said Cameron’s resignation honours list was ‘so full of cronies it would embarrass a medieval court’.48 But the most damaging criticism came from inside Cameron’s circle: Steve Hilton called the awards a symptom of ‘our corrupt and decaying democracy’.49
Cameron was able to walk away from Downing Street knowing that he had honoured the long-held Etonian tradition of looking after friends in need. They could now cash in on their time in government. Some set up consultancies to advise companies they’d been introduced to while in power; others joined multinational businesses with the implicit intention of opening doors to Whitehall. There were even examples of former advisers now being paid to advise each other.
As for George Osborne, less than a year after being sacked as chancellor he was parliament’s highest-earning member, receiving £650,000 a year working one day a week for City investment firm BlackRock, where his friend and adviser Rupert Harrison had already secured a well-paid berth. He has also earned £800,000 from delivering speeches to bankers and executives and was paid £120,000 a year for a research role at a university in the USA. All this on top of his job as MP. In February 2017 he was made editor of London’s Evening Standard on an estimated £250,000 a year, prompting calls for him to resign his seat, which he did at his leisure.50
The meteoric rise and padded fall of David Cameron is a story that can only be told because of the public school system. His privileged education gave him the training and access that hugely increased his chances of winning. By charting his rise to power it is possible to show how easy it is for a tight coterie of people to play the system. Some of them come from wealthy families, some are aristocrats. Others may be the sons and daughters of entrepreneurs or oligarchs. But the single most important thing they have in common is that they received a private education in England. Not to put too fine a point on it, they bought their success. And in Britain that’s how the system works, as Vladimir Putin well knows. Betting on an Etonian successor to Cameron and Johnson, the Kremlin in 2018 appeared to have ordered its cyber army to get behind the #Moggmentum hashtag and support Tory leader hopeful, Jacob Rees-Mogg.51