LITMIR.BIZ

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but the cause remains obscure. Its effect was to shorten his legs below the knee and twist his feet, one of which had three toes, the other four. He had a series of operations in very early infancy to provide some relief to the problem – although after the age of three he was never particularly in pain – and straighten his legs, but while the rest of him suggests a man of about six foot two, he is actually about a foot shorter than that.

      The young Ian was sent away to boarding school, wearing specially adapted shoes. He went first to Betteshanger School in Kent, where, because of his disability, he was made to have an extra hour’s rest every day. At home, in London during the holidays, his mother treated him with a great deal of affection but also with some firmness. She believed that the effect of his disability had to be minimised, that he had to do as much as possible for himself. Friends say it was from her that he acquired much of his tough-mindedness and independence. To this day he feels in her debt for pushing him beyond what, at the time, he thought he was physically capable of doing.

      By the time Ian Cameron was preparing to go to Eton he suffered another blow – his father left his mother and married an aristocratic Austrian. Marielen von Meiss-Teuffen had been born in 1918 in Attersee near Linz, Austria, and was sent, while still a teenager, first to France and then to Britain. When she met Donald Cameron in wartime London, she was working as an announcer for the BBC having already divorced her first husband Reginald Critchley, with whom she had had a daughter, Verena. Now in her late eighties and living in a nursing home in Vienna, Marielen says that at first Enid Cameron was friendly and ‘didn’t mind me being around’. When the exact nature of her husband’s relationship with her was revealed it was clearly a painful shock. ‘You can imagine what the woman must have felt to realise her husband was in love with another woman.’ While Donald Cameron and his new wife set up home in Clareville Grove, Kensington, his son was left to support his mother. It was a lonely, difficult and formative time for Ian Cameron.

      The failure of Enid Levita’s marriage may have prompted her to reflect on the shame of her grandmother, Lady Agnes Duff, who was shunned in society following two elopements and a divorce. Agnes, David Cameron’s forebear, eventually took refuge in nursing. It was there that she met and married Dr Alfred Cooper, a specialist in sexual ailments. (Cooper used to claim that between them he and his wife were acquainted with the private parts of all the peers in London.) Agnes’s parents were the 5th Earl of Fife and Lady Agnes Hay, but her most noteworthy relative from the more recent past was one of her four children, Duff Cooper, who became Sir Winston Churchill’s Minister of Information during the Second World War and whose beautiful wife Diana aroused such admiration. The philandering Duff Cooper was thus Ian Cameron’s great-uncle (although they never met). He was also, like Ian Cameron, a chairman of White’s, the men-only club in St James’s. David Cameron has expressed relief that he has not inherited Duff Cooper’s remarkable appetite for wine and women.

      Donald Cameron did not cope well with having a disabled son, and it has been said he did not encourage Ian to believe that he would be joining him at Panmure Gordon, where he was a senior partner. Had the father seen more of his son at Eton he might have revised his opinion. Ian Cameron did not shine academically at school, but his peers learned not to underestimate his determination. A lifelong friend Ben Glazebrook remembers playing a rumbustious game of indoor football in a corridor at Eton. ‘I had the ball at my feet…and I said “Oh yes, this is Ian, I can get past him.” Suddenly my wrists were seized in an iron grip by Ian, because all the strength of his legs had gone into his arms and wrists. I virtually needed a course of physiotherapy after that. He had this amazing strength, and he was always incredibly resilient, courageous and outgoing. He’d never been shy, and he was always very open. He said, “I can do everything except ski,” which I think he regretted.’ He also enjoyed cricket and tennis, and at Eton, when he took part in the Field Game, the school’s own soccer–rugby hybrid, he played in a position comparable to scrumhalf, where, on occasions, a low centre of gravity can be an advantage.

      Leaving school in 1951, Ian Cameron made a decision he later came to regret. Perhaps conscious of the need for a remunerative career, instead of going to university he decided to train as an accountant. While professionally useful, he found it less than entertaining (and was to forbid his children to enter the profession). Having qualified, he spent two years as a banker at Robert Fleming before joining Panmure Gordon, where he worked exceptionally hard to overcome the stigma that some had attached to his physique, and in 1957 emulated his father and grandfather in becoming a partner. He was, he admitted privately, a ‘nepotistic heir’. Socially Ian Cameron was no less determined to triumph over his disability. He moved out of his mother’s house in Lowndes Square, near Harrods, into a flat of his own round the corner in Basil Street. ‘Ian was always incredibly social,’ remembers Glazebrook, who lived near by. ‘He used to have endless parties with the most beautiful girls.’

      In 1958 Donald Cameron died, leaving an estate valued at £57,408 (worth £928,000 today) and an inheritance that enabled his son to consider marriage. When the charming Mr Cameron set out to woo her, Mary Mount saw not deformity in him but spirit. He threw himself around the dance floor with the same gusto with which he had played football. The couple married on 20 October 1962, two days before Mary’s twenty-eighth birthday. It might have surprised his father that Ian Cameron married so well, into a family that has belonged to the British Establishment since long before that phrase was coined. Tall, stately and sure of herself, Mary is a typical Mount. From the beginning she had two qualities that her friends and family most admire in her now – compassion and common sense – and she is typical too for having served as a magistrate for over thirty years, as her mother and grandmother did before her.

      The patrician spirit of the Mounts is neatly captured in a story about David Cameron’s great-great-great-grandfather William Mount, an MP (then unpaid) for an Isle of Wight seat and a man of some wealth. He employed a young boy – whose father had died – as a bird-scarer in his fields, and presented the boy with a book (‘the first book I had ever owned’). The boy remembered the gesture and in later life wrote gratefully to Mount’s son, William George Mount: ‘You will always be a means of doing good and exerting influence in quarters as unexpected as in my case.’

      ‘W.G.’, as he was known, was a barrister, ‘gentleman and landed proprietor’ (of Wasing Place, Berkshire), and became MP for Newbury. Perhaps the most formidable of the Mount ancestors, like most MPs at the time he had little truck with godlessness. In 1851 the family invited Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford, to stay. He, famously, was a vigorous opponent of Darwin’s theories of evolution and was later to cross swords with T. H. Huxley at a meeting of the British Association when he provocatively asked his opponent whether it was from his grandmother or his grandfather that he claimed descent from a monkey. In the 1880s, W.G.’s eldest daughter Elizabeth, every bit as devout as her father, took a weekly Bible class, which was attended by the groom’s boy, the schoolroom maid, the upper laundry maid, the laundry maid and the house, kitchen and scullery maids, as well as the butler, doorman and members of the Mount family. Staff were obliged to attend, and were excused only when beaters were needed for a shoot.

      According to the 1880 census, W.G., by then running the Wasing estate, employed thirty-two men to look after his 500 acres and a further fifteen servants to staff the house and attend to his six young children. One of these children was William Arthur Mount (educated at Eton and New College, Oxford, and also a barrister), who in 1900 succeeded his ailing father, unopposed, as Conservative MP for Newbury, before losing it to the Liberal candidate six years later. ‘Billy’ worked diligently and regained the seat in 1910, frequently speaking out against Home Rule for Ireland, until he stood down twelve years later. He continued in public life as chairman of Berkshire County Council and as chairman of the South Berkshire Hunt. He was made a baronet in June 1921 and died in 1930 at the age of sixty-four. He had three sons, the eldest of whom, William Malcolm Mount (the second baronet, known as Bill), succeeded to the title at the age of twenty-six.

      ‘W.M.’

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