David Cameron has been criticised by former ministers and a defence chief in the unofficial biography written by Conservative peer Lord Ashcroft and the journalist Isabel Oakeshott.
The former army chief Sir David Richards is quoted in the Daily Mail’s serialisation of the book as saying that he had to remind the prime minister that being a member of the cadet force at Eton did not qualify him to decide the tactics of complex military operations. Richards has previously criticised the Conservatives for failing to mount a proper military defence of the opponents of the Assad regime in Syria.
A former Conservative party chairman, Michael Ancram, is also reported as describing the British incursion into Libya in 2013 mounted by Cameron as equivalent to Tony Blair’s Iraq war, leaving the country in a worse state than at the outset.
In the book, Sir Nicholas Soames, the former defence minister, also attacks Cameron for shrinking the Royal Navy.
The allegations arguably do not reveal anything damaging, other than disagreements at senior levels about the conduct of foreign and defence policy.
Oakeshott appeared to take a step away from the most lurid allegation in the book, involving a dead pig and the prime minister when he was a student at Oxford, saying that she and Ashcroft had initially regarded it as a joke.
Asked on BBC Newsnight if she thought that the claims were true, she replied: “We’ve been very careful in the way that we have worded our account. This is not myself and Lord Ashcroft making these allegations.
“We are very clear about how they came about. They came to us from a distinguished MP who was a contemporary of Cameron’s at Oxford.”
Oakeshott added: “What we have said is that this is the account that we were given and we initially dismissed it as a joke. However the source repeated it on a number of occasions so we have left people to decide for themselves whether it’s true.”
She said: “Let’s put this story in context because it is a few paragraphs in a book which is some two hundred thousand words long.”
