If there is one political question that needs to be addressed today it is this: what sort of prime minister would David Cameron be? The voters may have decided they do not like Gordon Brown, but before they let go of Nurse they are entitled to ask whether the smooth, young man they are offered instead is not something worse.
A year of privileged access to Cameron, combining lots of close-up observation with one- to-one interviews, would seem a wonderful opportunity to answer the question. You might get under the veneer. You might be able to tell people something new and important.
Well, Dylan Jones, the editor of GQ, had that opportunity, and he found out that Cameron “doesn’t really like” Pot Noodles. He also discovered that the Tory leader prefers Lily Allen to Amy Winehouse (though he buys the albums of both), that he needs six or seven hours’ sleep a night, and that long ago his father took the Times and the Express but at some point dropped the Express for the Mail.
It doesn’t stop there, for it turns out that Cameron has views on the recent history of his party. They go like this: Margaret Thatcher, of course, was a great leader, and he can’t find fault with John Major; William Hague was also a great leader; Iain Duncan Smith was ahead of his time; and Cameron admires Michael Howard “a lot”.
Cameron on Cameron: Conversations With Dylan Jones (Fourth Estate, £12.99) bills itself as the best introduction to the man who could be our next prime minister, a must-read for voters intrigued by this political phenomenon, and indeed it tells us one important (though not very new) thing about the Conservative leader: he knows how to pick an interviewer.
Though Jones makes a half-hearted claim, in the introduction, that his objective is merely to put information before the reader, when he gets to work he leaves no doubt that his real business is brazen hagiography. Cameron, he declares, is “my man”, his ascendancy “coinciding with my own political shift”. And the author has no interest in challenging; the verbatim question-and-answer passages that form the heart of the book have all the excitement and interest of a village cricket team bowling to Australia. You know the sort of all-things-to-all-men stuff Cameron puts in his speeches? Well, he gets to say those things here and nobody stops him.
Maybe we should not expect the editor of GQ to tackle the details of crime policy, or education; he is not a policy specialist, after all. But even where he has the ammunition to hand he refuses to use it. It is clear to anyone interested in Cameron’s life, for example, that he does not like people dwelling on his years (1994-2001) as a top PR for Carlton Communications. It is equally clear that if we are to understand him at all, we need to know in what ways he was influenced by the job, the longest of his short career and a job of particular relevance for a man now in politics.
The business journalist Patrick Hosking once wrote in this magazine that he had found Cameron the PR man obstructive, and that his work included such wholesome fare as “defending the dumping of News at Ten to make way for a revival of Mr and Mrs; arguing the case for commercials targeted at children; defending the screening of insalutary scenes from The Vice within minutes of the 9pm watershed; explaining how Carlton had come to screen a one-hour programme, conceived, sponsored and entirely funded by British Telecom”.
Jones quotes those lines from Hosking at one stage in his narrative, but he does not put them to Cameron. When it comes to the interview he allows his man to finesse the period entirely. “I learned how to explain difficult and complex things,” is his airy verdict on those years. “I also learned that spin and PR will not get you where you want to go, and that truth is the most important commodity.” How nice.
All we see is that seamless, shiny veneer. Try this. “Are you middle- or upper-class?” he is asked. “I don’t really buy these labels.” “Come on, gun to your head,” Jones insists. “Gun to my head, I suppose I’d describe myself as well-off.” And this: “You’ve been described as a cautious man. Are you?” “Well, I’m a mixture of sometimes being quite radical and wanting changes, and on the other hand being cautious and thoughtful about how to bring it about.”
If you like this sort of thing, as the old saying has it, then you will find it is the sort of thing you like.
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