Like any self-respecting avenger, Lord Ashcroft believes that to settle a grudge with an act more grievous than the initial affront constitutes entirely natural and defensible behaviour. Perhaps, to judge by his bold advertisement of grievance, Ashcroft even hopes his implacability will raise him in national esteem, while his enemy, David Cameron, comes crashing down.
In his preface to Ashcroft’s Revenge, as the sarkily entitled Call Me Dave should, for accuracy’s sake, be subtitled, our embittered citizen of Belize chronicles the slights that – according to Senecan convention – now justify the sacrifice of his dignity to character assassination. To sum up: Ashcroft gave the Tories tons of money; Cameron didn’t offer him a decent job in return. For those who elect to live and die by the honour code of the non-dom, this appears to be pretty much up there with the abduction and ravishing of a chaste and beloved daughter.
But if his colossal load of resentment is ever to bear fruit, Ashcroft must persuade readers that the prime minister’s offences go far beyond this private betrayal of a man not many people care about. Hence – for all that it rests on evidence so non-existent as to threaten the entire enterprise – the sensational pig story that opened newspaper extracts. Of Cameron’s numerous crimes the one that dominated last week’s charge sheet, perhaps because it exercises Ashcroft most, is that of insufferable, spoiled privilege. And for any readers who, prior to Call Me Dave, believed Cameron to be a comprehensive-educated meritocrat, endowed equally with modesty and the common touch, the news must have come as quite a revelation.
True, for those already acquainted with the Bullingdon photographs, and maybe also the film, The Riot Club, based on Laura Wade’s stage play, Posh, Ashcroft does detail further, twittish behaviour, beyond membership of an odious, mercifully minute men’s club dedicated to smashing things and cherished principally by the arrogant, immature and socially insecure. Like many an Eton clone, Cameron believed himself to be of interest to espionage professionals. He was associated – probably half-heartedly, given the lack of firm social guarantors – with another small subsection of the Oxford population that perennially attempts a Brideshead vibe, with fancy-dressed inebriates, in tents.
More damning, surely, is Cameron’s failure in maturity, ever to investigate a world outside his own tribe’s. On the contrary, once eased into government he enlisted old school friends to help make the world more like Eton. In the words, allegedly, of his own spin doctor, Lynton Crosby, Cameron remained, in his forties, what he appears to have been at 18: a “posh tosser”.
The likely outcome of this undeviating tossage in government was neatly summarised by Sidney Blumenthal, as Hillary Clinton’s adviser, in 2009: “A Cameron government would be more aristocratic and even narrowly Etonian than any Conservative government in recent history, sharply contrasting especially with the striving and classless perspective of the grocer’s daughter, Margaret Thatcher.” Though even the prescient Blumenthal would not have guessed that, by 2015, three members of the Bullingdon club would be in cabinet; that a Tory minister would describe the number of Etonian colleagues as “preposterous”; that an Etonian would declare himself the perfect replacement for the current Etonian running London.
If Ashcroft is aware that his exploration of this theme, with the assistance of journalist Isabel Oakeshott, hardly changes the entitlement picture, he knows that, simply by dwelling on it, he generates gratifying levels of annoyance. Merely by promulgating Bullingdon memorabilia, he overturns years of effortful overlaying of images of Cameron in tailcoats and Cameron with huntsmen, with photos of Cameron eating Pringles, Cameron down the pub, Cameron the football fan – of just about any team, he’s that keen.
An episode in Anthony Seldon’s earlier biography encapsulates the fruitless struggle to reshape the Cotswold huntsman into something that better fits his party’s claim to the political centre ground. On a photo-opportunity in flooded Somerset, Cameron’s green Hunter gumboots having set poshness alarm bells ringing, some black, non-elite Dunlops were hastily substituted – only to inspire ridicule for being brand new. But, come 2015, Cameron still prevailed.
Maybe, before investing so much energy in tailcoat-shaming, Ashcroft should have considered the backlash – or indifference – every time Labour tries to stir up toff-hatred. Given what is now thoroughly familiar about his background and tastes, including the loutishness crudely magnified in The Riot Club, Cameron’s continued presence surely indicates a tolerance, however mystifying, of those identifying as ruling class, that goes deeper than following Downton or the latest fascinating brawl at Longleat.
Ending a week of pig/Piers Gaveston revelations, an opinion poll showed the public preferring Cameron as a leader, even though they viewed Corbyn as “more honest” , more in touch with “ordinary people” and commensurately, no doubt, much less in touch with pigs. And lest this triumph be interpreted as special immunity on Cameron’s part, or as victory for his humble wellingtons, the ascents of Boris Johnson, to any eminence he can get his hands on, and of Zac Goldsmith tipped to outvote the son of a bus driver, tell the same, dismaying story. In a country where 92 legislators are hereditary peers, and where the middle classes willingly pay the National Trust to keep breeding pairs of ruined aristocrats in their ancestral homes (the residents being more unwilling to downsize, even, than the clingiest baby boomers), a detectable whiff of superiority is not, perhaps, as repugnant as Ashcroft would wish.
He writes as if the British were finally over Brideshead. On the contrary, some deference levels are unchanged since 1975, when Basil Fawlty responded to “Lord Melbury’s” request for £100 in credit: “Oh, yes, I mean, will 100 be enough? I mean 150, two, 160? Let’s see, that’s uh, dinner tonight, few tips Oh, and it’s the weekend, isn’t it? Would 200 be all right? Please!”
Staff in a London hotel have been mocked for recently extending an identical-sounding welcome to a conman calling himself the 12th Duke of Marlborough. Not on account of the grovelling itself. But because everyone knows that, prior to offering the customary prostrations, loans, etc, one should always invite a duke to provide documentary evidence of his status.
If, as lengthily detailed by Ashcroft, Cameron is the conventional elite product, oozing ditto conviction in his fitness to rule, it does not seem impossible that many of his fellow citizens are agreed, being similarly conditioned, that this kind of impenetrable self-belief and vacuous fluency is the very definition of leadership. Maybe, just as the Labour party has recently put blokes in all its top jobs, for no better reason, you gather, than this is what its senior functionaries have always looked like, Cameron has the look of a proper prime minister not just in his own eyes, but, as the polls indicate, the public’s. Revenge-wise, it could be back to the drawing board.
