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at a difficult time. Eric Anderson recalls that John Faulkner was going through a period of illness and was not therefore able to fire on all cylinders. ‘I remember hearing that John relied a good deal on David, as his head of house, to hold things together at that time, and that John found him good at making sure that the junior boys were properly treated.’ Mark Dineley, who, as a junior boy, overlapped with him by just one term, confirms this: ‘I do recall him being unusually approachable and affable. He never had his head in the clouds. You could always talk to him.’ Tom Rodwell, a year older, says that unlike most senior boys, who tended to seem ‘godlike’ for their imperiousness and authority, Cameron was ‘always someone you could have a talk to on the stairs. He was a friendly and fair person. I remember having a not very serious bet with him about whether Wales would beat England at rugger. I bet that they would, and they did. He still owes me a fiver for that!’

      On one occasion, Cameron intervened to protect a boy, now evidently a senior figure with a financial firm in the City who wishes to remain nameless, who was being bullied about his Jewishness. ‘Cameron was very mature,’ says the man in question. ‘He didn’t get angry with them, or punish them, because then they would have taken it out on me. I’d have been fucked. Dave said, “It’s beneath you both to behave like this.” He was giving half the blame to me, you see, which I now understand was quite brilliant.’

      Cameron’s development at Eton might be held up as an advertisement for what the place can offer those whose qualities need to be unearthed. ‘I think down at the bottom of the school there were lots of people who were identified as natural leaders of other pupils at the age of thirteen and fourteen,’ says Tim Young. ‘They might have been head of their prep school, but often these are the people who end up at the peak of their life being secretary of the golf club. They never again achieve the great heights that they achieve in their teens. The great thing about David is that he wasn’t pigeonholed like that and developed his obvious potential in the sixth form. He did so in his own way, unmarked by the sort of expectation which surrounds, say, the captain of the under-fourteen rugby team.’

      Andrew Gailey says there is a discernible trend in boys whose academic talents flower late. ‘People who do that,’ he says, ‘although they grow in confidence more and more, they are never as confident as those who have started at the top. And there’s a sense in which he has always wanted to push himself and test himself more, not waste his time. He was able and ambitious, in a proper sense, but he was not one of those who was academically self-confident. There was a sense of him wanting to prove himself to himself.’

      Is David Cameron a ‘typical Etonian’? Can there be such a thing in a school which supposedly encourages individuality? He does seem to have some of the characteristics that are associated with Eton. Jane Austen has a term, ‘happy manners’, which certainly seems to apply. Tom Lyttelton says: ‘I wouldn’t use the word charm, which can be pejorative. But a facility for putting people at their ease. That, I would have thought, Cameron had in spades.’ Confidence, too, he says, which ‘is helped by spending your teenage years in a rather beautiful place, having your own room, being in an essentially happy environment with some very good characters around you, older and younger’. John Clark says Cameron certainly appreciated what Eton offered him: ‘If you come from a well-to-do background, you’re surrounded by able people, you do well academically, you’ve got a lot of advantages, you feel fairly strong about that. Apart from private business, the range of social contacts that operate within a house, for example, mean you are mixing with the house master, the Dame [matron], a whole series of teachers and so on. I think these encourage a sense of social ease, and not one uniquely associated with your own group but one which moves beyond that. This explains something of the charm of Eton.’

      But social (as opposed to academic) confidence is not as evident in many Etonians as it is in David Cameron. For all those who display that celebrated sense of entitlement, there are also others more inclined to question it, to be squeamish about such privilege. Why me? Is this really right? Do I want to be on the conveyor belt my parents put me on? James Wood says that Cameron was ‘confident, entitled, gracious, secure…exactly the kind of “natural Etonian” I was not’. There is little outward sign of David Cameron having kicked against what he had. Instead he accepted his parental assumption that ‘It’s okay as long as you put something back.’ ‘In every walk of life people try to find their own identity in relation to their parents, but David Cameron doesn’t seem to have done that,’ says one thoughtful Etonian outside his immediate circle.‘He’s a strange product of my generation. He just seems to have a mind-boggling level of self-belief. He seems to represent a continuation or perhaps regression to that noblesse oblige Toryism. Do we want to be ruled by the Arthurian knights again?’ As another puts it, ‘He’s a bit too “to the manor born” for my liking.’

      Yet others, more admiring of Cameron, say Eton’s role should not be overstated. Tom Lyttelton says Cameron’s groundedness and contentment may well predate his attending the school: ‘One really wonders whether someone so standing-on-your-own-two-feet can ascribe that much to Eton, or whether he would be doing so well whatever school he had been at.’

      Certainly Cameron took full advantage of the academic excellence that Eton offered. The boy who one contemporary described as ‘a bit of a nonentity at school’ got three As in his A-levels, then an even better result than it would be today. Another contemporary, who regarded Cameron’s success as a student of Politics – a subject which attracted few boys – as a misleading measure of his abilities, said at the time: ‘It is a scandal and a complete travesty that someone as mediocre as Dave Cameron can get a distinction.’ Cameron also sat the Scholarship Level exam in Economics and Politics and received a 1 grade. (He failed to turn up for another S-level exam in History, and so earned himself an X, for no score.) Having not been a likely Oxbridge candidate at all, he was now a strong one. Politics had become his forte, and his tutors were well placed to advise him on which college he should aim for. Tim Card and John Clark at Eton had connections with Brasenose College and encouraged Cameron to apply to read Politics, Philosophy and Economics. ‘We wanted him to do well and it was a very good place to do PPE,’ remembers John Clark, citing the presence of its politics tutor, the prolific Vernon Bogdanor, who, in addition to enjoying a good reputation in academic circles as a scholar, had something of a name in the wider world.

      Cameron sat the entrance exam at the end of the Michaelmas term 1984. This so-called ‘seventh-term’ option was later forbidden as it was deemed to give too much of an advantage to pupils of private schools. He was accepted for an interview, which in hindsight may seem like a formality, but he was caught bluffing about how much philosophy he had read. It did not hold him back. He was awarded an exhibition to the college of his choice, Brasenose.

      Having left school a fortnight before Christmas 1984, Cameron now had nine months in which to enjoy himself. James Learmond went to Nepal. Roland Watson went to Latin America. But few of his friends can remember what Cameron did in his gap year. ‘Whatever it was, it didn’t change him,’ said one. But while it is true that his travels were not as exotic as those of his peers Cameron did undergo a life-changing experience between school and university. In January 1985 he took up a temporary post as a researcher for Tim Rathbone, his godfather and the Conservative MP for Lewes.

      If his mother’s family, the Mounts, represent the patrician element of Cameron’s political heritage, the late Tim Rathbone stands for a more radical, liberal tradition. Indeed Rathbone’s father John became Liberal MP for Bodmin from 1935 until, as a fighter pilot in the Battle of Britain, he was lost in action in 1940. His great-aunt Eleanor Rathbone was a suffragette and was later elected an independent MP for the Combined English Universities in 1929. She campaigned for women’s rights and against poverty and was among the first to spot the dangers of National Socialism in Germany in the 1930s. It is said that she once tried to hire a ship to rescue Spanish Republicans from reprisals during the Spanish Civil War.

      Her great-nephew chose the Conservative Party, however, when after Eton and Oxford (he, too, read PPE) and a spell as an advertising executive in New York he was recruited to Central Office in 1966 – the year of Cameron’s birth. He became an MP in 1974, but by the time David Cameron turned up in his office in the Commons had

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