Cameron Obscura
david cameron features magazine politics archvie
Michael Wolff Bess Levin Kase Wickman Chris Murphy Eric Lutz Richard Lawson Condé Nast
In recession-battered Britain, where class divisions run deep, Tory leader David Cameron is a master of congenial compromise—and the likely next prime minister. Michael Wolff examines how the aristocratic Cameron and his Conservative Party have defused the hot-button issues.
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Vanity Fair
David Cameron is a snob, a toff, and an upper-class twit, with a pedigree of name-brand families across centuries of finance, culture, and social standing, including the Queen’s, who is a several-times-removed relative. He is everything a modern politician in a country determined to see itself as proudly middle-class should not be. He is, too, a member of the British Tories—indeed the leader of that unelectable party associated with mean-mindedness and execrable privilege. He’s also a P.R. man—with the skills and temperament to perform a makeover on himself and his party—which isn’t very popular, either. So he’s made himself over in that regard, too. His seven years as head flack at the big television group Carl­ton Communications was a brief professional excursion for him, just an experience in business, according to his aides.

This sounds churlish. And what I am—I think—is impressed. Here’s a modern political scene: a hundred Everymen in a makeshift auditorium in a strip mall in Reading, once a solidly British middle-class London exurb, but now a crossroads for South Asians, Africans, and Middle Easterners seeking a middle-class life in Europe. This could be an angry town-hall, Tea Party meeting, of the U.S. kind. The Brits, after all, are nearly as jobless as we are, their country more broke, their politicians even more disliked (in 2009, scores of members of Parliament were found to have flagrantly abused their expense accounts for items such as garden repairs and bathroom remodeling). But whatever the question is, David Cameron—43, tall, and handsome (if you go for a slightly moonfaced look)—can find the point of agreement. Then he layers on the relative exigencies, such that even the most attentive will have lost any thread of conflict by the end, which is always on an up note.

While this all sounds cynical, it is, too, curiously calming and novel—Cameron is a politician who quells, smooths, conflates, reassures. One who, in a few weeks, may lead an electoral reversal of a magnitude not seen in 80 years in Britain, and do what was considered pretty much undoable: bring the Conservatives and, in a sense, the upper class—a post-class upper class, if you will—back to power.

The U.S. and Britain are as linked in their politics as they are in their exchange of music, literature, and television (e.g., much of reality television is a British import). Margaret Thatcher is ever joined to Ronald Reagan; George Bush Sr. and John Major each made the other look older; Bill Clinton was teamed with Tony Blair; Blair then enabled George Bush’s Iraq war. There could not now, however, seem like two more divergent figures than America’s most famous conservative, Sarah Palin, laser-focused on her own passionate supporters, and Cameron, who has banished his party’s most soulful members to the attic.

“It’s hard for us to understand, if I can put it that way,” says Cameron, straining for understatement, about the Palin phenomenon, as we chat in his Parliament offices shortly after the New Year.

There are, in both countries, three political directions, a toxic right, a statist left, and a third way—the trickiest approach—which involves complicated role-playing, ideological legerdemain, and marketing acumen. It’s a political movement exemplified by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, and, owing to Monica Lewinsky and the Iraq war, seemingly discredited by them. David Cameron is the latest Third Wayer.

The billboards are everywhere: an airbrushed Cameron with the enthusiastic legend “We can’t go on like this. I’ll cut the def­icit, not the NHS.” Magically, the National Heath Service, that historical bugaboo of Conservatives dear to the middle class and great unwashed of Britain, is removed from discussion.

“I don’t believe for a minute he believes protecting the N.H.S. is a good idea,” says Fraser Nelson, editor of The Spectator, the Tory-leaning weekly, with some mixture of disdain and admiration.

Third Way politicians are contrast gainers. At their best, they make their opponents look not only unreasonable but unmodern. Next to Clinton, George Bush Sr. and Bob Dole appeared to be from other centuries. In Blair’s case, John Major and the ensuing Conservative leaders he opposed became fusty, comic figures (with bad teeth). Cameron stands against the current Labour Party prime minister, Gordon Brown, the Scottish parson’s son, whose lack of ease, personal remoteness, and instinctive doctrinaireness make him seem, compared with the unflappable Cameron, dark and flawed—a political train wreck.

This is all the more curious because by background Cameron should be the rigid one. But a point on which this election will likely turn is that temperament trumps class.

Exhibit A in the class war, and in the Labour Party’s attempt to paint Cameron as a foolish toff, is a picture taken in 1987 at Oxford, where David Cameron attended Brasenose College after Eton (the ultimate neon sign in class consciousness). It shows 10 young men, including Cameron and Boris Johnson—the Conservative mayor of London who in an upset in 2008 beat the popular left-wing incumbent, Ken Livingstone—as well as other highborn types. They are all members of a secret society, a Lord of the Flies rich-boy club known for spectacular drunkenness and casual destructiveness, the Bullingdon Club, posed in tailcoats, all with arrogant and dripping-with-scorn expressions, looking ever so much as upper-class young men might have looked, in the description of Frank Luntz, the American pollster who was at Oxford at the time, “on the eve of the Battle of Britain.”

“This was after Brideshead aired in the early 80s,” says Stevan Keane, a former Guardian and Channel 4 editor (i.e., a media lefty). “While these may be real toffs, by the time they stood on those Oxford steps toffhood had all but been dismantled in Britain by 50 years of social—and socialist—engineering.”

It’s role-playing, in other words.

If David Cameron was playing Brideshead at the time, now, with much Everyman bonhomie, he’s playing something much closer to Big Brother—an understanding of identity politics which can make the Labour Party, gamely playing the class card, seem hopelessly flat-footed.

Indeed, Boris Johnson has become the most endearing Conservative politician in Britain—many would argue the most popular politician—by playing (or consciously overplaying) this role of quintessential, somewhat ridiculous, and extremely entertaining Bertie Wooster type of appealing toff.

Johnson’s antics have arguably had for Cameron the beneficial effect of making him (vastly more posh than Johnson) seem so much more like a normal bloke. Or, in a further flip of pop-­culture interpretation, Cameron is appealing because he’s closer than most to Johnson’s re-invented toff.

Cameron could make plasticity and marketing technique a political virtue—that is, in a sense, what he’s running on.

After Oxford, Cameron becomes a Conservative Party apparatchik. He’s shortly a party favorite, renowned, even in his 20s, for his talents at preparing politicians for question time—when members of Parliament querulously question government ministers.

He meets Rachel Whetstone, a Tory aide and marketing prodigy, and her future husband, Steve Hilton, a Saatchi & Saatchi executive, who will become the pillars of the Cameron marketing and brand-development brain trust. (Whetstone is now a senior marketing executive at Google.)

And he meets his future wife, the personable Samantha Sheffield, who will become one of his greatest political assets and whose family is even more highborn and wealthy than his—her father is a descendant of King Charles II; her stepfather is William Astor.

It’s through her family that he exits politics in 1994, at the age of 28, and goes to work as a P.R. man for Carl­ton, the television company. This is, it should be noted, not just the P.R. business, but the P.R. business to the media business, which is yet another layer on top of another layer of artifice.

In 2001 he’s awarded a safe Conservative seat and becomes a new-blood Conservative backbencher. He bonds with another young M.P. and eager political marketer, the 30-year-old George Osborne, also a former Bullingdon Club member—they become cyclists, which they will adopt as a symbol of Conservative vigor and eco-friendliness—and both soon become part of party leader Michael Howard’s inner circle.

In Conservative shorthand, Osborne, the brilliant tactician, will become the brains of the party; Boris Johnson, the party’s most charismatic figure, its soul; and Cameron, the most media-ready of the new blood, its face.

In 2005, after Howard goes down in the Conservative Party’s third consecutive overwhelming defeat, Cameron, with Osborne managing his run, makes a bid to become leader. Bookmakers put him last out of the field of candidates.

But then something happens at the party conference in Blackpool: Cameron, without lectern, teleprompter, or notes, delivers an address of such verve, spontaneity, and clarity that he sweeps the conference. Pay no attention to the fact that this was all carefully rehearsed.

“He was plausible. That was a big development in the Tory Party, a plausible figure, someone not beset by obvious negatives,” says Ian Osborne, a Conservative Party adviser.

The next stage in Cameron’s and the Tory Party’s fortunes is what Conservatives now call, unself-consciously, “detoxification” or “decontamination.” All hard edges are rounded—even the logo is changed from a traditional torch emblem to a blurry rendering of a tree.

The result, in an age of polarization, is something rather extraordinary. Cameron “alchemized a position of more or less glutinous consensus,” says Boris Johnson, whose own relationship with Cameron tiptoes a fine line between admiration for his evident electability and doubtfulness about his intellectual bona fides. It is, as well, a bit chilling. The Cameron position isn’t about just consensus but about something more mystical, allowing everybody to hear what they want. Having systematically removed most of the overt points of contention—immigration, Iraq, Europe—the Cameron Conservatives then replaced them with a series of almost totemic notions of agreement.

Cameron is for marriage—an anti-riffraff signal that pleases the right—but also for gay marriage, which pleases the left; he is senti­mentally green, but opposed to over-­regulation; he is for responsibility, which suggests an anti-government view but also means he’s a champion of the poor.

It is, in many respects, a page from the 2000 George Bush campaign: compassionate conservatism—a phrase that Cameron actually uses. The curious difference is that it was always a relative red herring for Bush. People had a pretty good idea of what George Bush had in mind, compassionate or not.

This is much less evident with David Cameron.

“There’s a left-right spectrum—where are you? I don’t really do it like that,” Cameron said, both as explanation and obfuscation, during our January chat. “What I’ve tried to do is marry a belief in market economics with the importance of a strong economy while restoring the condition of the Conservatives’ being social reformers and also addressing the future—climate change and the environment. It’s the full kind of package.”

Curiously, he can say this without seeming too self-satisfied.

“The lion lies down with a lamb, calf, and fatling together, and a little child shall lead them,” says Johnson dryly.

“He is, I believe, much more conservative by nature than he acts, or than he is forced to be by political exigency,” says Tory M.P. and Oxford friend Ed Vaizey.

“In U.S. terms, he could be a moderate Democrat,” says party adviser Ian Osborne.

Cameron would have you believe that, all in all, such delineations and labels are less relevant to what he is about than his own “story.”

It’s an affecting one: for six years, he and his wife nursed their son Ivan, who suffered from cerebral palsy and a severe form of epilepsy, and who died, in the public eye, last year. (As it happens, Gordon Brown and his wife had a premature baby who died after 10 days, and have a young son with cystic fibrosis.)

And it’s a modern one. They’re a working yuppie couple: he in Parliament, she as the creative director at Smythson, the stationery store.

In the U.S. “the story,” a device used by none so well as Sarah Palin, transmits a set of secret messages to your base. The Cameron “story” is more elemental: you—the great majority—would like me, and understand me, and see things the way I do, if you walked in my shoes.

At a table in a Notting Hill restaurant, as I talk about the campaign with an heir to a great estate and a royal-family biographer, what I hear is great consternation about Cameron’s realness, about his loyalty to his roots—with frequent use of the term “P.R.” as an epithet.

On another afternoon, at The Guardian, an editor tells me, “The truth lies in the Bullingdon Club—all the secrets of who he is are there.”

Indeed, the British electorate seems to teeter now between a logical suspicion of the true nature of the man and a desire to be generous and accepting, to want what he seems to be proposing, which is this adaptable, fix-it-if-it’s-broken, don’t-fix-if-it-isn’t—or if it is broken, like the N.H.S., don’t open a can of worms, which will make it worse—approach, led by an intelligent-seeming and pleasant fellow. Somebody you can depend upon to hold it all together. Who would not vote for that?

But if the suspicion becomes too great, or if David Cameron’s postmodern transmutation of the class issue strays off its careful tonal balance—this is the first British general election in which there will be televised head-to-head debates—that could result in a rush to the lesser parties, such as the Lib Dems, and, even, the fringe groups (there are, after all, nearly a million people associated with the B.N.P., the quasi-Fascist party in Britain), and a hung Parliament.

Cameron is basing his campaign and, too, his idea of the Third Way—this further chapter in Clintonian and Blair-ite politics—on his being the bulwark against disagreeable and ugly people and other nameless terrible things. And he is counting on the fact that fewer and fewer voters will ask those old-fashioned questions about identity and provenance, which, after all, in the modern world are, for so many people, ever changing and fluid.