The political education of David Cameron

18 November 2009

The big influence on Cameron from his youth is the think tank founded by Neville Chamberlain, argues fellow Conservative Research Department alumnus Andrew Gimson

David Cameron arrived in CRD in 1988, fresh out of Oxford, and has contributed a short essay to this collection. It reads like the kind of thank-you letter written by a very polite Englishman, who is genuinely grateful for the hospitality which has been extended to him, but is not sure that he is ever going to see any way of repaying it. Cameron cites the description of CRD by John Wyndham, who worked there after the war and enjoyed its ‘bohemian sort of efficiency’. This is correct, as is the observation that one of the best things about working there was that at the age of 21 you could find yourself briefing the most senior people in the party.

Cameron thinks that in the Thatcher period, ‘The strong vein of social Conservatism which runs through our history... was not given as much prominence as perhaps it should have been.’ He is now reviving this tradition.

While in CRD, Cameron became friends with many people who now work closely with him in the great enterprise of trumping Blairite social democracy with Cameroon social Conservatism, such as Ed Llewellyn, Steve Hilton, Rachel Whetstone, Catherine Fall, Peter Campbell and Ed Vaizey. From before this period, Oliver Letwin began his political career in CRD, while George Osborne served a CRD apprenticeship a few years later.

Opponents such as Gordon Brown, who concentrate on the Bullingdonian side of Cameron, will never understand that he is a professional politician whose training started early, as did the training of his inner circle. The Cameron gang have been hard at work for 20 years, and are more accurately seen as the heirs, not of Tony Blair, but of Chamberlain and Butler.

Andrew Gimson is the Daily Telegraph’s parliamentary sketchwriter.