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and Marina Vaizey, the art critic. Both Vaizey and Llewellyn had already done some voluntary work for the CRD before going up to Oxford and so had an ‘in’ with Cooke and Harris that Cameron did not. But on arrival at CRD in early 1989 Vaizey found himself junior to Cameron just as Cameron was junior to Llewellyn by dint of length of service. Not himself the retiring sort, the young Vaizey was immediately struck by how at ease Cameron already appeared around even very senior politicians.

      Although Vaizey was to become a friend and ally, the next two figures on the scene are the most important for Cameron’s political development. In ideological terms – as well as in any other – Rachel Whetstone is a thoroughbred. Her grandfather was Sir Antony Fisher, an Eton-educated former RAF officer who made millions from the introduction of intensive chicken farming to Britain from the US and used part of the proceeds to fund right-wing think-tanks. Organisations like the Institute of Economic Affairs, which he founded and chaired, helped inject the ideas of Frederick Hayek and Milton Friedman into the political mainstream across the world. Sir Antony died just before his granddaughter started working at CRD but his daughter, Rachel’s mother Linda Whetstone, remains an influential figure on the libertarian right. Rachel’s father, Francis Whetstone, is a Conservative councillor in East Sussex. Their daughter was raised in the couple’s manor house near Wealden, and was educated first at Benenden and then at Bristol University. Socially, as well as politically, Cameron and Whetstone were cut from the same cloth and it was not surprising that the two became friends soon after she joined the CRD in early 1989.

      A far more unlikely addition to the set arrived three months later. Small, cocky, shaven-headed and foreign-born, Steve Hilton blew through the doors of the Conservative Party on the back of a hurricane. The young undergraduate was processing claims from the Great Storm in early 1988 in a Brighton insurance firm. It was tedious work for an intelligent man and he happened to see a party political broadcast in which Peter Brooke, then Tory Party chairman, invited any viewers who wanted to help the Conservative Party to dial 01 222 9000. He dialled the number and some months later found himself working as a volunteer in the CRD’s library – an early and personal lesson, perhaps, in the power of political advertising.

      Something about Hilton impressed Harris that summer. Perhaps he was taken with the fact that he had made a conscious choice to join the Tories, rather than being born into the party. Hilton’s mother and father had moved from Hungary to Britain in the mid-1960s not, as has been reported, to flee the Soviet repression of 1956 but to further their education. Nor did the surname come from the first hotel they stayed in on arrival: Hilton thinks his father chose it because it was a close approximation of his real name, Hircsak. His parents’ relationship did not withstand the move and his father moved back to his homeland. At the age of twelve, upset that letters to his father were no longer being answered, Hilton set out to visit him during a holiday to see his mother’s family in Hungary. Having caught the train to Budapest alone, he went to his father’s last known address and discovered the sad truth. His father had died, and nobody had told him. Hilton’s upbringing in Brighton was modest – his stepfather, also Hungarian, was a builder and his mother a former student – but he won first a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital School and then a place at New College, Oxford to study PPE. (He and Cameron did not meet at university.) His Labour friends say it is his family experience of, and subsequent hatred for, communism that informs his politics, rather than any instinctive love of the Conservative Party. ‘Were it not for what the Soviets did to his parents, Steve would be one of us,’ claims a member of Tony Blair’s inner circle. Unfortunately for Labour, however, Harris offered the young Hilton a job at CRD.

      Other members of Cameron’s current inner circle to have worked at CRD include Catherine Fall, his gate-keeper, Peter Campbell, who helps him prepare for Prime Minister’s Questions, George Bridges, his political director, and George Osborne, his shadow Chancellor. The latter two arrived after Cameron had left and are not members of his original ‘gang’.

      While long-term prospects at CRD may have been good, short-term finances were poor. Cameron’s pay would have been between £10,000 and £12,000 a year when he started and probably not much more when he left after the election of April 1992. The contrast with the incomes of friends who had gleefully signed on with big City firms could hardly have been greater. After university he shared a flat with Pete Czernin, his friend from Eton. The address, 46 Harrington Gardens, was in South Kensington, a red-brick block of the sort favoured by foreign City employees on secondment to London. It was a pad for bachelors of the most eligible sort. As the only son of Mary Czernin, matriarch of the Howard de Walden dynasty, Cameron’s former flatmate can expect a sizeable portion of his family’s £1.5 billion fortune. Czernin, now a film producer, has said suggestions that affluence bought excess are wide of the mark, however. ‘You’re never going to get Dave in a Six-in-a-Bed Supermodel Drug Orgy. Sorry, that’s just not Dave.’ Indeed a guest at a poker party attended by Cameron at around this time remembers him being the only guest to refuse a cannabis joint passed around the card table. His ostentatious refusal was, even then, marked down to political ambition.

      What Cameron really enjoyed was a good argument. He had liked ‘sounding off ’ in Oxford, and now, in London and working for the governing party, he was mixing with people even better qualified to match him in debate. He would hone his rhetorical skills in social settings. Several of his friends testify to how much he enjoyed jousting across a dinner table, and sometimes with a degree of antagonism and competitiveness that suggests he was practising with a higher forum in mind. ‘He is infuriating to argue with,’ says his friend James Fergusson, a regular late-night sparring partner. ‘It’s extremely stimulating, but you never win. I know every trick of his. He’ll change the subject. He’ll overwhelm you with statistics. If that doesn’t work, he’ll make a joke or play to the gallery. If he’s losing he’ll never let it remain as one on one, he’ll get other people to giggle on the sidelines. That’s the way it works. It’s infuriating but it’s a very effective political trick.’

      He was conscientious at work. Even when it came to Central Office’s drinking culture, Cameron was not one of those who would take boozy lunches or, as one or two did, drink wine at their desks. ‘He was clearly very ambitious,’ recalls a former colleague who joined the CRD some time after Cameron. ‘We all worked hard, but David would really burn the midnight oil.’ It was not long before this serious, good-looking, intelligent man started attracting admiring glances. ‘He was very young, boyish looks, clearly very bright,’ recalls Angie Bray, then the Tories’ head of broadcasting and now the party’s leader in the London assembly.

      Caroline Muir, a secretary at the time, remembers: ‘He seemed to be the only human being in the Research Department and he had superb manners.’ Another former Smith Square secretary says: ‘All the girls fancied him – he talked to people. He was always bobbing in and out of his office, willing to pitch in.’

      One colleague who took a shine to him was Laura Adshead, whom Cameron had known slightly at Oxford. In common with a number of Cameron’s former girlfriends or close female friends, she is from a diplomatic family. She had been educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College and Christ Church, Oxford before arriving at CCO around the same time as Cameron. The romance began in the spring of 1990 and lasted until summer 1991, although it does not seem to have ended very tidily. ‘I seem to recall the young lady had to be given a period of compassionate leave to recover,’ says one of the couple’s managers at the time. (After her relationship with Cameron, Adshead, a close friend of Whetstone, dated the historian Andrew Roberts. Later she moved to New York, where she underwent a spell as a nun, tending goats and immersing herself in Catholicism, the faith of her birth. She subsequently became a management consultant before returning to London.)

      When he had been in Smith Square for several months, an outstanding opportunity presented itself, but one which in later life he may have come to regret. How would Cameron like an all-expenses-paid eight-day trip to South Africa taking in the sights of Durban, Cape Town and Johannesburg? Perhaps with happy memories of his holiday to Kenya, in mind the young adviser, rising fast through the ranks at CRD, said he would like it very much. But South Africa, unlike Kenya, was still under the control of an apartheid regime, pursuing overtly racist policies in defiance of international opinion. At the time Cameron was

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