Candid Cameron?
Cameron on Cameron: conversations with Dylan Jones
Fourth Estate, 352pp, £12.99
The trouble with political biographies nowadays is that they struggle to find much new. Every utterance from our politicians is pretty much instantly available to any of us. Their lives are lived in public, so the biographer is unlikely to stumble across a shocking indiscretion or something wholly different from what’s in the papers. Cameron on Cameron takes a different approach from traditional political biographies. Rather than cobbling together cuttings and speaking to friends and foes to build up a picture of the subject, GQ editor Dylan Jones uses what he pretentiously describes as the ‘conversation avec’ format, so the vast bulk of the book is in direct quotes from the subject.
This approach has huge advantages, giving a refreshing directness to the reader. Rather than wade through the polemics of the author, and the mediated analyses, readers of the book feel like they are sitting opposite David Cameron on a train ride. It is a style in keeping with the disintermediation that characterises our Google age. As much as possible we want to see the original texts, hear the message directly and make up own minds.
Politicians often complain, rightly in my view, that traditional mainstream media often don’t let them get their message across, drowning it out in journalistic hyperbole and two-way analyses, rather than simply being the medium between the electorate and the elected. Here then is a thoroughly modern book format that allows the subject to say what they want at some length. It is stitched together with some commentary and scene setting from Jones, but I found myself skipping over them towards the end. All they tended to show was how completely Jones had become a Cameron fan. But the drawback of the format is that Cameron is firmly in ‘on the record’ mode throughout. And although the book is fairly comprehensive in its policy coverage, the questioning is so tame that it becomes one unchallenged rehearsal of the Tory ‘line to take’ after another. So the health service doesn’t need ‘more bureaucratic reorganization’ but it needs ‘fundamental change to decentralize and empower.’. Or how about this for insightful, forensic questioning: DJ: ‘Why can’t we take some of the lessons we’ve learned in the private [education] sector, and apply them to the state sector?’ DC: ‘It’s a good idea , a sensible idea, but a rather radical one for lots of people to understand. It’s also not obviously a Conservative idea . . .’ DJ: ‘I think it’s incredibly Conservative . . .’
Through such banal questioning and unchallenging acceptance of everything Cameron said, Jones simply succeeds in showing that he is very much ‘avec’ the Tory leader on everything he says. Indeed, some of the conversations are almost soppy. You feel like you are watching a RomCom as Dylan and Dave discover, on their first date, that they were in the Soviet Union at the same time and share each other’s dislike of totalitarian regimes. That’s, like, so spooky!
But leaving the author’s admiration for his subject aside, what does it tell us about the man who, according to the betting markets, has a 75 per cent chance of becoming our prime minister? First, that he’s a real old-fashioned Tory. He was politicised by the Cold War, the Falklands War and Margaret Thatcher. His mother used to take his sister to the polling booth and threaten to go in with her, lest she didn’t vote Tory. His instincts for a smaller state, lower taxes, individual responsibility and distrust of Russia haven’t actually changed much since he was in his teens.
I used to know Cameron well in the 1990s. He was home secretary Michael Howard’s special adviser when I was shadow home secretary Tony Blair’s press person. Later he was the communications person at Carlton, promoting the doomed OnDigital, when I was the communications person at Sky, promoting SkyDigital. We used to see each other socially a good deal. And although he was always bright, funny and comfortable about the diversity of London life, it was hard to classify him as a great Tory moderniser wanting to change the whole direction of the party.
What he has done brilliantly is change its brand, giving it a friendlier, less aggressive feel. Far from looking like an aloof toff that the more cack-handed Labour strategists seek to paint him as, he, and his hugely likeable wife Sam, have been able to represent a confident, modern face of Britain.
Like Blair before him, he seems also to have a knack of being in step with the times. The country is more interested in individual choice, in gaining more control over public services, in questioning wasted public spending. Cameron on Cameron is effectively a good marketing exercise by him. But if Labour dismisses Cameron’s rise as just evidence of the power of spin and slick marketing, they underestimate – like the Tories did with Blair – the scale of their predicament. Only by moving on to his ground and showing Labour can also be in step with the changing needs of the electorate will they have any chance of turning things around.