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The most serious of his Oxford girlfriends was Francesca (‘Fran’, as she was known then) Ferguson, a statuesque, artistic and forthright half-German History student. Cameron was, according to a friend, ‘mad about Fran’. She arrived at Oxford having had no serious boyfriend and became a thoroughly worldly and lively character. They started going out shortly before Christmas in their first term and it quickly became a pretty serious affair. The daughter of a peripatetic diplomat, she was very conscious of not being from the same settled Home Counties milieu as Cameron, but they seemed a good pair. ‘I didn’t go skiing with everyone else, or stay in the same house in France as they all did, so I didn’t really feel a part of his very English world,’ she says. ‘I was bored senseless with that party scene in England. He managed to be always comfortable in it but his life had more content. He would read more, think more. He wasn’t one of that bland lot.’

      She invited him to stay with her parents in Kenya in the summer of 1986, prompting him to take a temporary job shifting crates near Newbury to help earn enough money. Both enjoyed the holiday hugely, spending time away on ‘a real safari, with trucks’, and Cameron, having missed his plane home and delayed returning by a week, enjoyed the celebrated (from White Mischief days) Muthaiga Country Club and playing golf with Francesca’s father, John. He impressed her parents with his charm, but there was an initial sticky moment involving her German mother Monika. He brought a present for his hosts of a Monty Python record, presumably thinking it would be something of an ice-breaker, should that be necessary. What he did not recall until the record was playing on the first evening was the North Minehead By-election sketch, which includes a scene of highly dubious taste featuring a ‘Mr Hilter’. Monika Ferguson still remembers with amusement the look of embarrassment on Cameron’s face. Nonetheless, so impressed was she by Cameron’s easy manner and intelligence that she told her daughter one evening, ‘That chap is going to be Prime Minister one day.’ On leaving he won further goodwill by discreetly leaving a tip and a thank-you note for Alice, the Kenyan woman who had cleaned his room.

      Francesca and Cameron went out for nearly eighteen months. She wanted to experiment, but her boyfriend didn’t feel the same. ‘I was too much for him,’ remembers Ferguson, who now runs an architectural practice in Basel, Switzerland. ‘I was too demanding of his time. I wanted to have arguments and be distracted, but when someone is very ambitious and wants to get a First they don’t want someone demanding too much of them, and I think I probably did that. Also, I was quite jealous and would provoke him to try to shake him out of his self-assuredness.’ When Cameron ended the relationship, she was very upset and asked a friend to speak to him on her behalf. The friend remembers he was unshakeable. The relationship was to end. She was also struck by how much he seemed genuinely concerned that Francesca should not feel too hurt.

      Generally he is good at keeping up with old girlfriends, but his relationship with Lisa De Savary, a retiring, sweet-natured girl and daughter of the flamboyant property developer Peter De Savary, did not end well. She fell for Cameron in a big way, but, as a friend puts it, ‘Dave kind of dumped her and she was very cross about it. It all left rather a nasty taste.’ He also went out with Alice Rayman, a student at Wadham, who marked a reversion to type. She became an entertainment lawyer and married the son of Tory politician Tom King.

      Oxford offered plenty of opportunities for Cameron to play sport. He captained the college tennis team, and played cricket (‘badly’, says a staff member), also for the college. He also made the occasional (restful) sortie on to the river. One Saturday towards the end of his second year at Oxford, Cameron invited his sister Clare, then aged fifteen, to visit. She was preparing for exams and Dave thought it would be a good opportunity to show her his new surroundings. She brought along a friend, Jade Jagger, daughter of Rolling Stone Mick Jagger, a fellow pupil at St Mary’s, Calne, whose budding beauty did not pass unnoticed among Dave’s friends. Dave decided to take his little sister and her friend out in a punt in time-honoured fashion. He asked James Fergusson to join them, and he helped contribute to an idyllically innocent afternoon on the river by taking turns with the punt pole and chatting idly. At tea later in the room of James Delingpole, now a journalist, Fergusson played an imperfect version of ‘Satisfaction’ on the guitar, whereupon Jade piped up proudly, ‘My dad wrote that!’ The following Monday, Cameron’s mother Mary received a call at home. It was Mick Jagger, not pleased. ‘What’s all this my daughter’s been getting up to with your son?’ he demanded. ‘You know I don’t approve of bloodsports.’ Mary, dipping lightly into her reserves of breeding and politesse, explained gently that punting is what one does in a punt, and that his daughter had enjoyed an entirely peaceful afternoon punting on the river. Cameron, who adores retelling the story, later muttered a little impatiently that ‘it shows how much these people have to learn’.

      Having spent his second year living in college, with a big, panelled sitting room and tiny, cold bedroom, Cameron’s third and final year was spent living at 69 Cowley Road, sharing with Giles Andreae, his friend from earliest times, Sarah Hamilton (a product of St Paul’s Girls School, who was studying law) and David Granger, a popular sportsman, now in television. While the pressure was on for the keen student anxious to get a First, Cameron continued to enjoy himself. The house had a laid-back flavour, and benefited from his enthusiastic efforts in the kitchen, often to cook the odd Peasemore pheasant for an informal dinner party. ‘He would always be very concerned that you were enjoying yourself, and then if you were he would be full of self-mocking praise for himself,’ remembers a friend.

      ‘There was a fair amount of beer and wine about,’ says Giles Andreae, ‘but it certainly wasn’t a house full of ravers.’ They would use the local kebab van a good deal, as well as the Hi-Lo, a cheap Jamaican restaurant directly opposite their house patronised by generations of undergraduates. There Cameron, Andreae and their friends would go once or twice a week – sometimes late at night – for goat curries, funky chicken and Red Stripe lager, served up by the Rastafarian chef– owner Hugh Anderson, who is also remembered for his over-proof rum. ‘He was a happy, easy-going character, quite pleasant,’ remembers Andy, as the Rastafarian is known to everyone. ‘He was very modest and very orderly, not a wild guy at all.’ So orderly were Cameron and Andreae that Andy would hand over his one-year-old son Daniel to the two undergraduates to look after. The little boy was known, a little distantly perhaps, as ‘boy child’. Cameron and Andreae would bounce him on their knees as they watched daytime television when Andy was busy in the kitchen over the road. Cameron, for one, made a point of never missing Going for Gold, a programme presented by Henry Kelly, which he may have omitted to mention in some of his subsequent job interviews.

      One Lent term, he was chosen, as a guinea pig, to spend five weeks at Stanford University. Friends say it was five of the most enjoyable weeks of his life. He shared a room with two Americans and was required to do pretty well no work. Camilla Cavendish, now a journalist with The Times, who followed in his footsteps a year later, says that the Americans had all adored Cameron, not least for his accent. ‘I got the impression I was a big let-down after Dave,’ she says.

      It is said that Cameron is notably loyal to his friends – one says his dependability is the best of his many assets – but in a milieu as privileged as his, where the going was pretty well always good, there might not be a great many opportunities to show it. Yet Giles Andreae was a beneficiary of his – and his parents’ – steadfastness. During their last year at Oxford, he was found – after several wrong diagnoses – to have Hodgkin’s disease. The delay in the diagnosing of the cancer required him to have intensive chemotherapy, sedatives and steroids, as well as a variety of experimental drugs. For each bout of chemotherapy, he had to undergo a general anaesthetic and was left debilitated and low.

      Andreae’s survival was a matter of touch and go for some months. To help him recover his strength after the treatment, Cameron would drive his friend to his parents’ house at Peasemore in a battered Volvo he owned as a student. ‘Dave used to take me down in his car, tuck me up in bed and give me some videos,’ says Andreae, who would then stay for two or three days until he was strong enough to go back to Oxford. ‘Dave, despite it being the middle of finals, would pop by to say hello, and managed to find some humour in a pretty grim situation. He was a very supportive friend, but it was typical of his family to do

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