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And then came Eton.

Eton and freedom. This may seem odd when you consider that you are away from home, dressed in a tailcoat, looking like a penguin, and punished severely for any wrongdoing. But when you arrive, the feeling – of having your own room, being allowed to walk around the small town from class to class, cooking your own tea and using your large amounts of free time as you choose – is enormously refreshing.

Another surprising thing about Eton is the extent to which you are able to find your own way. The teaching is first-class, and there is strong academic pressure to be a success in the classroom, and powerful social pressure to be a success on the playing field. But it is – or at least it was – a school that genuinely lets you, indeed encourages you to, forge your own path. The arts school, design studios, music facilities: they are all there for you. For someone like me – a jack of all trades – it suited me perfectly. I loved the place. I made friends. I was happy.

But it was far from all plain sailing. Trouble started brewing for me in my third year due to my growing sense of being slightly mediocre, a mild obsession about being trapped in my big brother’s shadow, and a weakness for going with the crowd, even when the crowd was heading in the wrong direction. These things, combined with the temptations of drinking, smoking and thrill-seeking, nearly led to me being thrown out of school altogether.

In my political career I answered questions about drug use in my earlier life by saying ‘Everyone is entitled to a private past,’ and leaving it at that. But what happened did have a material effect on my career: not so much later, but when I was sixteen. A few friends had started getting hold of cannabis. In those days it was mostly in the form of hash, typically dark brown and crumbly, although occasionally some ‘Red Leb’, supposedly from the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, would show up. Instead of popping behind the school theatre for a fag, we started going for a joint.

In my case – comically, as I now look back on it – three of us used to hire one of the school’s double scull rowing boats and head off to a small island in the middle of the Thames called Queen’s Eyot. Being quite small back then, I was the cox. Once there, we would roll up and spend a summer’s afternoon gently off our heads.

This all came crashing down when the ‘ringleaders’ and so-called ‘dealers’ – the boys who had brought the drugs into the school – were caught and expelled. My two rowing friends were the first out of the door. I am not naming them now, not least because they’ve endured repeated approaches and entreaties from journalists to spill the beans on me. They never have.

I was one of the last to be rounded up. Boy after boy had been interrogated. It was getting close to half-term. As a minor offender, maybe I had got away with it? Not a bit of it.

I can still remember where I was sitting – in Jo Bradley’s maths class – when the door opened and I was summoned to see my housemaster, John Faulkner, in the middle of the day. This was without doubt the worst moment of my life so far. The housemaster gave me no chance for weak excuses: ‘It’s no use denying it, David, we have signed confessions from others, and we know about at least one occasion when you took drugs.’ The next stage was going to see the headmaster, Eric Anderson.

Eric is a wonderful man who has the probably unique distinction of having taught two prime ministers – Tony Blair at Fettes and me at Eton – and an heir to the throne – Prince Charles at Gordonstoun. He now lives in my old constituency, and we sometimes bump into each other in Chipping Norton or in his village of Kingham, where he lives opposite a pub I am particularly fond of.

The strange thing about that interview was that he seemed more ner­vous than me. I think he found the whole episode shocking, and he was clearly still coming to terms with the words for various drug paraphernalia. Because I was so keen not to implicate anyone else, I claimed – totally falsely – that I had only smoked cannabis once at Eton, and all the other times were ‘at home in the village’. This involved me telling a more and more elaborate set of lies. I am not sure he believed a word I said, but my abiding memory is the moment he asked, ‘Yes, Cameron, but who rolled the joint?’

The short-term consequences of my crime were tiresome, but I was so relieved at not being expelled that I would have been happy to accept any punishment. In the event I was ‘gated’ (restricted to within the school grounds), fined £20 for the smoking element, and made to write out one of Virgil’s Georgics on the morning of the school’s open day, 4 June. This involved copying out line after line of – as far as I was concerned – untranslatable Latin verse

The real punishment was telling my parents. During the course of the 4 June celebrations, which I joined late after having completed my Georgic, Mum could hardly look at me, while Dad simply said, in a rather British way, that it would not be mentioned that day, but he would have a serious talk to me in the morning. When morning came he was nursing a hangover, and made rather a mess of it all.

The long-term consequences of my drugs bust, however, were wholly beneficial. This was the shock I needed. First, I knew that one more misdemeanour would mean curtains for my time at Eton. Next, I realised that I needed to stop moping about lagging behind my brother and make my own way. Crucially, instead of drifting academically I needed to make a greater effort. It was time to pull my finger out.

My O-level results were, for Eton, distinctly mediocre. But as soon as I got going in the lower sixth year – ‘B block’ at Eton – I was a student transformed. I loved my subjects (history, economics and history of art), I adored my teachers, and my results started to improve rapidly.

Great teachers are the secret to any great school, and Eton is particularly blessed. The reason for singling a few out is that they so inspired me – including when it came to politics – that they really changed my life.

Michael Kidson, a wood-block-throwing eccentric, was a superb history teacher who rejected all forms of Marxist determinism and unashamedly taught the ‘great men’ version of history. He brought the nineteenth century alive. Brilliant but biased, he thought Disraeli was an utter charlatan and all politicians after the fall of Lloyd George, with the exception of Churchill, pygmies. His love for Gladstone was such that when he read the account of the grand old man’s death in Philip Magnus’s biography, tears streamed down his cheeks.

But while history was a subject I loved, and history of art the one from which I remember most, it was economics and politics that really set me alight. Here was something that was relevant, exciting, intellectually stimulating, and really seemed to matter. Instead of learning about past problems, you could learn the tools to solve new ones. And this was the era of mass unemployment, high inflation and persistent British economic underperformance. More than almost anything, studying what has wrongly been called the dismal science put me on the path to a life in politics.

To me at least, right from the start it was the radical monetarists and free marketeers who seemed to have the new and exciting ideas. There was a radical Institute of Economic Affairs pamphlet we were encouraged to read, ‘What Price Unemployment?’, which rejected all the old ideas about pumping more government spending into the economy and trying to control wages and prices. I think we were told to read it so that we could critique what was seen at the time as dangerous nonsense. I thought it made pretty good sense.

And so the mediocre sixteen-year-old became a good enough pupil to be awarded an exhibition to Brasenose College, Oxford, in the autumn of 1985 to study politics, philosophy and economics.

There are moments of life you never forget, such as your wedding day and the birth of your first child. To them I would add another: if you are ever in the fortunate position of having one, an Oxbridge interview belongs with those indelible moments. I still shiver at the memory. Three badly dressed and dishevelled dons sitting in front of you and trying to work out whether you are just the product of a good education, or genuinely bright. They were pretty convinced that I was the former, and had a really good go at me.

‘Tell us which philosophers you have read.’ I reeled off the very few I had read something about: Marx, Descartes and John Stuart Mill. ‘Yes, and what others?’ They waited until I had got to the end of my list, then started grilling me on the last name I had thought of, Immanuel Kant. It was agony.

Where did my fascination with politics come from? There was certainly plenty of politics on both sides of the family. My mother’s forebears, ‘the Mounts of Wasing’, had served in Parliament for over a hundred years, starting off with a seat in the Isle of Wight before moving to Berkshire in the 1800s, where one of them became Newbury’s first MP in 1885.

But I don’t believe I inherited any political genes. I was influenced instead by what was happening as I came of age.

For anyone who was a teenager in the 1980s, the influence of ‘Mrs Thatcher’, as we always referred to her, was massive. You couldn’t be neutral about her. In simplistic terms, my generation was divided into those who hated her bourgeois capitalism, her slavish devotion to the US and the warmonger Ronald Reagan and her brutal suppression of the miners’ strike, and those who saw her as a brave fighter for economic and political freedom who was determined to modernise Britain and free us from the grip of over-mighty trade unions.

I was securely in the second camp. I believed that what was being done by Thatcher was essential.

In 1984 I took a year off between school and university, during which I worked in the House of Commons for my godfather, the Conservative MP Tim Rathbone. Tim was what was then called ‘a dripping wet’, a Tory opponent of Margaret Thatcher. He was a great lover of the Conservative Party, Parliament and public service, with a passion for Europe and our membership of what was then the EEC. He had a deep interest in reforming British drug policy and the provision of nursery education. He asked me to carry out research for him on these two subjects, which I found very stimulating.

As well as doing research, Tim let me roam around the House of Commons and the House of Lords, attending select committees, watching what happened in the chambers, and absorbing the atmosphere of the place as it was in the middle of the Thatcher years. I remember the booming voice of Ian Paisley as I got into a lift with him. I recall going to watch Harold Macmillan’s maiden speech in the House of Lords, in which he criticised Thatcher’s handling of the miners’ strike.

From the House of Commons I went to Hong Kong. I was determined to work abroad rather than just travel, and was fortunate in having connections through my father with the Keswick family and the age-old Far East trading company Jardine Matheson. Jardines had made its first fortune selling opium to the Chinese in the 1840s. That association would complicate some of my first visits to China as leader of the Conservative Party and as prime minister. In November 2010 the Chinese were incensed that my team and I were wearing poppies for Remembrance Sunday, suspecting that they symbolised the opium trade, and the two wars Britain fought to keep that trade open, with which they believed my family was personally associated. They insisted that we remove them before our meetings with the president and the premier in the Great Hall of the People. The official Foreign Office advice, delivered at the embassy in whispers accompanied by loud music, under the assumption that the Chinese were listening in to what was being said, was that we should acquiesce. We refused, and there was a brief stand-off during which it looked as if the entire trip would be cancelled. In the end they relented: the poppies stayed on, and the visit went ahead. The Chinese have very long memories.

Hong Kong in 1985 was a pretty nervous place. The joint declaration with China securing the end of British rule in 1997 had recently been signed, and Jardine Matheson had announced the transfer of its headquarters from Hong Kong to Bermuda. I was sent to the Jardine Shipping Agency, where I found myself the only Westerner in an office of over a hundred Hong Kong Chinese. Our job was to book cargo onto container and other ships, and to look after the ships and their captains as they came into the harbour. My role was that of ‘ship jumper’, sent out in a small boat, or ‘lighter’, to board the big liners, meet the captain and ensure that everything went smoothly. It was an interesting job for someone who was only eighteen, and I learned a lot.

From Hong Kong I travelled to Japan, and then to the Soviet Union. Ever since hearing the Russian Nobel Prize-winning author and dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn speak, I had wanted to visit the country. I had read about the Trans-Siberian Railway, and thought that would be a good way of doing so. The trip had a profound effect on me.

The train did not set off from its traditional starting point, the historic port of Vladivostok, which back then was a military base and closed to tourists. Instead we began our journey in a dreary grey town called Nakhodka, and joined the traditional route at Khabarovsk. I spent the next six days in ‘hard class’, sharing a compartment with two male students from East Germany and Russia, and a female student from Japan.

It’s hard to convey now just how grim the Soviet Union looked and felt in the mid-1980s. I boarded the train full of excitement about this epic journey, but at the first stop most of the food disappeared as local people rushed on board and bought or bartered everything they possibly could. I had brought some oranges from Japan, as I’d been warned about the shortage of fruit and vegetables. I remember people on the train watching me with fascination as I peeled and ate them, as if they’d never seen these things before.

The well-worn clichés that young Russians and East Europeans were desperate for Western music and jeans turned out to be absolutely true, and these were the first subject of conversation with my two east European travelling companions. But the thing I will never forget is the stories they told me about just how grey and oppressive life was in East Germany and Russia, and how jealous they were of the West. How they knew that their leaders were lying to them, and that the propaganda about their countries’ success was nonsense. My new East German friend flicked through my cassette collection and announced that, ‘While you have great music records we just have tractor-production records, and they’re all lies.’

I was a George Orwell junky, having read Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Homage to Catalonia several times over. I knew the history and the theory, and here was the living proof of communism’s total failure. When, a couple of years earlier, Ronald Reagan had called the Soviet Union an ‘evil empire’, many people in the West had thought he was guilty of crass overstatement. I came firmly to the conclusion that he was totally right. From that train ride onwards I was never in any doubt that in the battle between the democratic, capitalist West and the communist, state-controlled East, we were on the right side. For my political generation the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was a seminal moment, and for those of us who distrusted socialism, and hated what communism had done to eastern and central Europe, it was a moment of great ideological confirmation.

At the end of the epic railway journey – day upon day of mountains, rivers and never-ending silver birches – I met my friend Anthony Griffith in Moscow, and we travelled together around the Soviet Union. Most visitors at that time would be part of an official Intourist-organised group, and because we were travelling on our own we attracted quite a lot of interest from the authorities. We hadn’t booked transfers from trains to hotels or anything like that, yet we tended to be met at every station or airport by a man in a long dark overcoat who already seemed to know where we were going.

Our itinerary caused me to make a diplomatic gaffe many years later. I was making small talk with Vladimir Putin at the G8, and told him about my extensive travels around his country. As I reeled off the list of cities I had visited – Moscow, Leningrad, Yalta, Kiev … – he stopped me to say, ‘Yalta and Kiev are no longer part of my country.’ In that moment I glimpsed the intense personal pain that the break-up of the Soviet Union had caused this old-fashioned Russian nationalist.

And it was in what is now Ukraine, on the beach at the Black Sea resort of Yalta, that Anthony and I were approached by two young men. One of them spoke perfect English, the other spoke French and some English. We never discovered what they were doing on a beach that was reserved for foreigners, but we didn’t see any harm in accepting their invitation to have lunch and then dinner with them. They lavished vodka, sturgeon and caviar on us. We weren’t naïve, and our suspicions increased when they started trying to goad us into criticising Britain and the British government. We made our excuses and left.

Later, when I arrived at university, I asked my politics tutor and mentor Vernon Bogdanor whether I had been right to be suspicious, and he was pretty convinced it was an attempt to recruit us.

As we crossed into a bleak and depressed Romania, most of my books about politics were confiscated by a bad-tempered border guard as ‘inappropriate’. We then meandered our way through Transylvania to Hungary, and on to Vienna and Salzburg, where I was finally able to meet the Austrian woman, Marie Helene Schlumberger, who had run off with my now long-dead grandfather. She regaled us with stories of Austria before the war, the Russian occupation (which was only lifted in 1955) and my grandfather – ‘my darling Donald’ – while plying us with schnapps.

I was happy to be back in the West. It was time to go home, and then to university.

Although I went to Oxford frequently as a child, and although it is the capital of the county I represented in Parliament for fifteen years, I still feel a huge buzz every time I set foot back in the university part of the city.

I felt a great sense of privilege at being able to walk Oxford’s streets, study in the university’s great libraries and live in a magnificent and historic college. The college system brings people together in a way some other universities fail to do. The tutorial system means you have direct access, either on your own or in a very small group, to some of the finest minds in the world.

When people ask me what I most loved about being at Oxford, it wasn’t the politics. I hardly took part. My fascination with politics was developing, but for some reason I didn’t want to play at it. I visited the Oxford Union a few times, and saw stars like Boris Johnson, already a very funny speaker, and masters of debate like Nick Robinson, who would later become political editor of the BBC.

It wasn’t the sport that made Oxford special either. I briefly captained the Brasenose tennis team, and we reached the university finals. But the truth is that my teammates were so much better than me that I often had to drop myself from the squad.

My partner as third pair was a law student, Andrew Feldman, who became a lifelong friend. Andrew would raise the money for my 2005 leadership bid, and became chief fundraiser for the party, then its chief executive and finally party chairman. I would argue that he is the best chairman the Conservative Party has had in its entire history. The figures certainly back that up: we took over a party with £30 million of debt and handed it over eleven years later debt-free and with cash in the bank.

In Downing Street I kept reading that I was ‘the essay-crisis prime minister’, leaving vital work until the very last minute. I will come to how I made decisions as PM a bit later, but that certainly wasn’t how I worked at Oxford. While most of my friends had late-night essay crises fuelled with black coffee and cigarettes, I hardly ever worked in the evening, and almost never at night. But I loved the life. I was fascinated by my studies. I made friends. I had fun. I argued. I gossiped. And I fell in love. Lots of times.

I can’t, of course, write about Oxford without three dreaded words that haunted me for most of my political life: the Bullingdon Club.

When I look now at the much-reproduced photograph taken of our group of appallingly over-self-confident ‘sons of privilege’, I cringe. If I had known at the time the grief I would get for that picture, of course I would never have joined. But life isn’t like that.

At the time I took the opposite view to Groucho Marx, and wanted to join pretty much any club that would have me. And this one was raffish and notorious. These were also the years after the ITV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, when quite a few of us were carried away by the fantasy of an Evelyn Waugh-like Oxford existence.

The stories of excessive drunkenness, restaurant trashing … all these things are exaggerated. I was never arrested. I was never completely insensible from drink. However, it is true that the election ritual was being woken up in the middle of the night by a group of extremely rowdy men turning your rooms upside down. In my case this was made worse by the fact that I had had a party the night before, and there were dozens of empty wine bottles just outside my door. I have a pretty clear memory of walking from my bedroom into my sitting room to find a group of people making a terrible racket, with one of them standing on the legs of an upended table, using a golf club to smash bottles as they were thrown at him.

I can’t swear that one of these people was Boris Johnson, but he was certainly a member at the time. Boris has claimed subsequently that he was unable to climb over the wall into my college. I’m not sure I believe his story. But I’m not totally certain of my own, either. So perhaps I should leave it there.

What did I love most about Oxford? I did love the work.

Vernon Bogdanor was, and still is, one of the leading experts on the UK constitution, electoral systems and – interestingly – referendums. The opposite of the fusty don in an ivory tower separated from the real world, he was always making us relate political history and constitutional theory to present-day politics.

I was taught economics by the brilliant Peter Sinclair, who could write simultaneous equations on a blackboard using both hands at the same time. His lectures were always packed, as he knew better than anyone how to bring the subject to life. Years later he surprised me by turning up unannounced to help me canvass when I first stood for Parliament, in Stafford in 1997. Peter bounded up to the first door, and told the unsuspecting inhabitant, ‘I was your candidate’s tutor at Oxford and he really is very clever.’ Needless to say, the voter was both baffled and unmoved. I, on the other hand, was very touched.

One of the many things Oxford taught me was how to handle stress. Looking back, it seems unfair that we had just eight three-hour exams, squeezed into little more than a week, to justify our entire three years’ work as an undergraduate. In my case there was no dissertation, no coursework, no pre-marking – nothing except for those exams. The stress was quite extraordinary.

Talking about getting a first at Oxford is probably almost as annoying as talking about going to the university in the first place. But psycho­logically it was an important moment for me.

I had absolutely no idea of what I wanted to do once I left. I certainly hadn’t fixed on a political career. Like many others I did the so-called ‘milk round’, and was interviewed by management consultants, accountancy practices and a few City firms, although as this was the year after the great stock-market crash of 1987, most of them had pretty much stopped recruiting. One interview was with a young management consultant working for McKinsey called William Hague. He didn’t offer me a job – and neither did any of the other leading companies.

Jardines in Hong Kong were keen to have me back, but while I was considering this I saw an advertisement for the Conservative Research Department (CRD), and remembered coming across it when I was working with Tim Rathbone. There is no doubt that the interview that followed, and taking the job that was offered, changed my life even more than going to Oxford. It set me on the path of the political career that the rest of this book describes.

I only really knew I wanted to dedicate myself to politics and pursue a political career once I started working in it. But after that I was in absolutely no doubt. It was a vocation, the only thing I really wanted to do. I wanted to serve. I cared deeply about my country. I believed in public service. And I came to see – and to believe profoundly – that it is through political service that you can make the greatest difference.