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Thursday 21 August 2008

Trying to work out what David Cameron really thinks, I had a strange sense of déjà vu

Nick Robinson reviews the week in politics

Nicholas Boles, one of the earliest believers in the need for the Tories to change radically, credits Samantha Cameron with ‘dragging’ her husband ‘to see the world as she saw it’. Boles says she forced the Tory leader to understand that Section 28 (the ban on the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality in schools) was ‘an attempt to stigmatise a particular group’. The Tory party had treated Cameron so well, Boles argues, that it took Sam to make him understand other people’s hatred of it. A surprising role, perhaps, for the daughter of a baronet whose job is selling £950 handbags.

It was the birth of their severely disabled child, Ivan, which forced the Camerons to live their lives as many others live theirs — dependent on public services. Night after night spent sleeping on hospital floors changed the man who’d come from a ‘rarefied background’, says Ian Birrell, who met Cameron as deputy editor of the Independent, but befriended him as the fellow father of a very disabled child. The experience did more than make Cameron a ‘small c’ conservative when it comes to the funding of the NHS. It also filled him with frustration about its bureaucracy and fuelled his belief that the state needs to create the conditions in which voluntary organisations can thrive.

However, it took the Tory defeat of 2005 finally to turn Cameron from archetypal Tory boy to arch Tory moderniser. Danny Finkelstein, the Times columnist, met Cameron when he was head of research at Conservative Central Office in Smith Square. They were part of a group of Tory modernisers who used to talk politics over pizzas. He says that labelling the Cameroons ‘the Notting Hill set’ misses the point. They are, he says, ‘the Smith Square set’ whose shared experience of defeat forged their politics and distinguishes them from the Tories who came before.

Opponents would, no doubt, add a fourth image of Cameron — the PR man. All these images may help explain the political journey Cameron has undertaken, but they cannot predict its eventual destination. And that is where friends of Cameron become rather hazy. Faced by choices about governing rather than political positioning, they cannot spell out what he would do.

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