David Cameron

David Cameron

David Cameron is the British Prime Minister, leader of the Conservative Party, and the Member of Parliament for the Witney constituency.

Background

Cameron has been described by Patrick Cracroft-Brennan, of the guide Cracroft's Peerage, as "the most aristocratic leader of the Conservative Party since Alec Douglas-Home." He is the son of stockbroker Ian Cameron and Mary Mount, daughter of Sir William Malcolm Mount, 2nd Baronet. His great-grandfather Sir William Mount was Conservative MP for Newbury from 1900 to 1906 and from Newbury 1910 to 1922.

History

Cameron was part of Tory prime minister John Major’s ‘breakfast club’. This true blue brat pack advised Major in pre-dawn meetings on confronting Labour in parliament. Cameron pumped Major with slick arguments against the minimum wage, compassionately claiming that rises for the low paid would leave them unemployed.

Dave then became special adviser to Tory chancellor Norman Lamont. In his memoirs, Lamont recalls that he was ‘a brilliant Old Etonian with a taste for the good life’. Cameron stood by Lamont when the chancellor said mass unemployment was a ‘price worth paying’, and when he wasted billions failing to prop up the pound on ‘Black Wednesday’.

He had a sudden loss of compassion, however, when Lamont resigned, after which he got a new job as special adviser to Michael Howard. A hurt Lamont recalls his first, awkward, post-resignation Tory cocktail party. ‘The next person I saw was David Cameron, my former special adviser at the Treasury. He cut me dead.’ Unable to show compassion even to fellow Tories, Cameron wants us to believe he cares about the poor and excluded.

Working for Howard, Cameron’s compassion also seemed rationed. Derek Lewis, the former head of prisons, claims Cameron asked him to reconsider regulations giving prisoners a ‘balanced and nutritious diet’. Lewis says Cameron was passing on orders not from the home secretary, but from his wife, Sandra Howard, who thought the food rules were ‘too generous’. Howard strenuously denied that Cameron asked Lewis to keep vitamins out of the prisoners’ porridge, but Cameron certainly stood by Howard as he shifted the Tory party’s law and order strategy ever rightwards. Later, he went on to be part of ‘Team Howard’, the group campaigning to make Howard the Tory leader of the opposition.

Some people say Cameron’s Tory modernisation is all spin. Well he does have a history of dressing up cheap rubbish – having been Carlton TV’s spin-doctor in the 1990s.

Cameron's aides

Only this summer David Cameron admitted that he could fit his campaign team into the back of a taxi. George Osborne was the first MP on the back seat, followed by Michael Gove, Edward Vaizey, Andrew Robathan and Hugo Swire.

The flip seats were taken up by Catherine Fall, the chief of staff, and Steve Hilton, his strategist. George Eustice, the chief press officer, crouched on the floor and Boris Johnson climbed into the boot. They are now dubbed the June Cameroons, they are fluent in Cameroon and remain incredibly loyal to their chief.

By the end of the summer, Mr Cameron needed a minibus to take round his supporters. He had won the backing of some serious financial donors, the most important being Lord Harris of Peckham. He could still cram them all into one hotel room for meetings at the party conference.

But minutes after his speech, everything changed. The team couldn't keep up with the new applicants. By yesterday morning, 117 MPs had joined his campaign. And yesterday afternoon, it was confirmed that another 134,446 Tory voters had joined Camp David.

Gove & Vaizey

David Morrison writes:

Two other close associates of Cameron are newly elected Conservative MPs, Michael Gove and Ed Vaizey. Both, like Cameron, are in their late 30s. Gove was formerly a deputy editor of The Times, and is still a columnist there. Like Osborne, Gove is a fan of George Bush, and an enthusiast for Operation Iraqi Freedom. On 30 October 2005, on a BBC Panorama programme, he acted as the advocate for the indefinite occupation of Iraq.

Son of a Labour peer, Vaizey was a speechwriter for Michael Howard, and occasional columnist in the Guardian and other papers. (Cameron himself wrote a fortnightly diary of his political activity for The Guardian, beginning in early 2001, before he was elected to the House of Commons, and ending in the spring of 2004, by which time he was deputy chairman of his party.) Vaizey’s columns were a bland expression of the need for the Conservatives to “modernise” in some unspecified way. George Bush’s virtues were never mentioned, let alone praised. Unlike Osborne and Gove, he wasn’t obviously a neoconservative in foreign policy.

But, as Neil Clark pointed out in The Guardian, Vaizey and Gove are both signatories to the Statement of Principles of the British neoconservative organisation, The Henry Jackson Society Project for Democratic Geopolitics , which was launched in Peterhouse College, Cambridge earlier this year. Henry Jackson was a Democrat member of the US Congress for over 40 years until his death in 1983. He opposed détente with the Soviet Union, and is the ideological forbear of modern neo-conservatism. Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz worked for him in the 1970s, and went on to work for Ronald Reagan. “International patrons” of this British Society include the stars in the American neoconservative firmament, for example, Robert Kagan, William Kristol, Editor of the Weekly Standard, Richard Perle and James Woolsey, former Director of the CIA.

Other aides

• Edward Llewellyn, 39, chief of staff. Mr Llewellyn went to Eton and Oxford with Mr Cameron and worked with him in the Conservative research department. When the Tories went into opposition he became adviser to Chris Patten, the new Governor in Hong Kong and worked with him on the handover. He has also worked with Paddy Ashdown in Bosnia.
• Catherine Fall, 38, deputy chief of staff.
• Steve Hilton, 36, spin doctor and strategist
• Lord Harris of Peckham and Andrew Feldman - donors. Lord Harris has bankrolled Camp David, donating £90,000 from his £250 million fortune made in carpets, and is tipped to become Tory treasurer. Mr Feldman, 39, was at Brasenose with Mr Cameron and was in the college tennis team with him. His family textile company Jayroma has donated to the campaign and Mr Feldman is likely to be offered the job of deputy treasurer.
• George Eustice, 34, head of press. A farmer for several years with his family in Cornwall before going into politics. He was lured away by Business for Sterling to recruit business supporters opposed to the euro and became hooked. Soon he was director of the anti-euro No campaign. In the 18 months before the election he was Michael Howard's deputy press secretary. Polite rather than scary, his role model is Sir Bernard Ingham, not Alastair Campbell.
• Gabrielle Bertin, 27, deputy press officer. Glamorous, impeccably dressed baby of the young campaign team. She worked for Mr Cameron when he was shadow education secretary, and previously as press officer to Liam Fox when he was co-chairman of the party. She ensures that Mr Cameron catches all his trains, helicopters and cars and that his tie is straight before he goes on air.
• Sophie Pim, 28, and Liz Sugg, 31 - events organisers

They ensured that Mr Cameron had his own make-up team for Jeremy Paxman so that - unlike David Davis - he did not end up looking like a ghoul. Liz Sugg worked for Sky News and Sophie Pim worked in public affairs before they met while managing media for the Conservative Euro-MPs. They wear skinny jeans and pumps as they race between meetings to ensure that their man has everything he needs before he goes on stage.

• Elder statesmen Chris Patten, the Chancellor of Oxford University, advises on tuitions policy.
• William Hague has given advice on the make-up of the shadow cabinet and how to plot the first 100 days.
• Oliver Letwin, who ruled himself out of the leadership race, has given policy advice.
• Nicholas Boles, the director of Policy Exchange, advises on gay issues and localisation.
• Mr Cameron's brother Alex, a QC, advises him on legal matters.
• Lord Lamont of Lerwick, his old boss, discusses economic direction.
• Lord Powell of Bayswater, Margaret Thatcher's aide, debates statesmanship.
• Rupert Hambro, chairman of J O Hambro investment bank, is helping him win over the city.
• Michael Green, the former chairman of Carlton, provides media advice.
• Dougie Smith

The Leader's Group donor club

Set up in 2003, David Cameron's Leader’s Group 'has grown to become a key part of Tory fundraising' according to the Daily Mail, which revealed in January 2014 that the elite dining group had donated more than £43.1 million to the party since 2001. Secrecy surrounding its events has raised suspicions; no list of members has ever been published nor details of the topics discussed ever revealed. The Conservatives continue to refuse to release public information about the group beyond details of those who have attended the events every quarter since 2012.

A Channel 4' Dispatches programme in 2008 investigating Cameron's Leader's Group originally claimed Cameron that had secured more than £50million in donations over the two-and-a-half-years after he first became the Tory leader in 2005. Norman Baker of the Liberal Democrats reportedly complained that Cameron's fundraising group met in Parliament at the taxpayers' expense and also asked for its members' names. None were divulged. The letter in response to his question simply stated that the group comprised of Cameron's donors who had donated £50,000 or more to him and that a donation of this amount automatically grants the person membership. It was reported that members are then invited to attend special Leader's Group events where they meet up with Cameron in person.

Members

According to the Daily Mail, membership is dominated by financiers. Those attending dinners from mid-2012 until January 2014 included a dozen hedge fund bosses and five bankers, including three former executives from failed banks Lehman Brothers and Barings.

The Mail reported that the group also includes the wives of two controversial Middle Eastern businessmen not eligible to donate in their own right':

• May Makhzoumi, has given more than £1million since 2010. She is married to Lebanese businessman Fouad Makhzoumi, who was caught up in a scandal involving Conservative Cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken.

• Rosemary Said - has given the Conservatives almost £580,000. She is married to Syrian-born businessman Wafic Said who made a fortune as a fixer to the Saudi Royal Family, including the controversial Al Yamamah arms deal with the UK.

Other members include:

• Alexander Temerko, a wealthy Russian businessman and the former vice-president of bankrupted Russian oil giant Yukos. He is now a UK energy industry investor.

The 2008 Dispatches investigation also identified various group members including:

• Ian Taylor of the Vitol oil company. In 2007, Vitol's Swiss subsidiary Vitol SA pleaded guilty to first degree grand larceny after paying $13million in 'secret kickbacks' to the Iraqi government in exchange for oil under the United Nations' oil-for-food program. They were fined a total of $17.5million ($13 million in restitution to the Development Fund for Iraq)

• Paul Ruddock, who personally donated more than £200,000 to the Tories. Ruddock's hedge fund Lansdowne Partners made millions from the collapse of failed UK bank Northern Rock through the controversial practice of short-selling its shares. Ruddock was knighted by the government in 2012.

• Michael Alen-Buckley personally donated £100,000 in the two years up until 2008, and another £12,000 since. Buckley is chairman and co-founder of hedge fund RAB Capital, which in March 2012 donated £50,000, automatically securing Leader's Group status for the firm. Until 2008 RAB was the most significant fund involved in the mining industry, with over £7billion of investments, including many controversial and risky projects such as that planned by GCM Resources in northern Bangladesh, which threatens to potentially displace up to 120,000 people from Phulbari region and destroy a world heritage mangrove forest. RAB's Special Situation's company fund sold over 20 per cent of its stake in GCM Resources in June 2008.

• Lord Irvine Laidlaw was reported to be Cameron's biggest donor up to 2008. He reportedly had promised to become a UK taxpayer in turn for a peerage, but then broke this promise. He lives in Monaco and is estimated to save a whopping £50million in tax by doing so. Laidlaw withdrew from the House of Lords on 6 July 2010, following the introduction of new rules preventing people with non-domiciled tax-status from sitting as peers. According to the Scotsman he had already withdrawn much of his support for the Conservatives.

• Michael Ashcroft is reported to have donated over £10million over a number of years. He is not listed as a personal donor, however Dispatches uncovered that millions have made their way to Cameron through a 'chain of companies'. Ashcroft is reported to own the Belize Bank (he used to live in Belize) with an address of 60 Market Square, which is the registered address for donations given to Cameron. Ashcroft is also reportedly involved with Bearwood Corporate Services: a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a loss-making company that is also registered as a donating company. In 2008 Ashcroft served as Deputy Chairman for the Tory party and a member of its management Board. He was also chair for the 'Target Seat' campaign which targets marginal seats such as Worchester. In 2000, Ashcroft was reported to have promised to reside in the UK in return for a peerage. Dispatches stated that he refuses to say if he's a UK resident or not, or to disclose any information regarding his tax. It is unclear what his status is, in 2002 he was registered as an overseas voter, however it may be that he has now chosen not to appear on the register's public list. It is estimated that tens of thousands of pounds should be due in tax, but the investigation was unable to uncover whether this had been paid.

Cameron's Activities

Dinner and Drinks with Rupert Murdoch

The Independent reports that during the summer of 2008, David Cameron 'accepted free flights to hold private talks with Rupert Murdoch on his luxury yacht off a Greek island'. Murdoch's News Corporation owns the Sun and the Times, as well as a large stake in Sky News and a variety of other media businesses around the world.

Delaying the start of his family holiday in Turkey, Cameron flew to Santorini, courtesy of 'public relations guru' Matthew Freud where he had drinks with Murdoch on his luxury yacht 'Rosehearty' and later attended a dinner party with him on Freud's yacht. It is estimated that the flights that Cameron (and his wife and children) were given were worth around £34,300 in total.

Cameron's entry in the Register of Interests declares the free flights from Freud, who is married to Murdoch's daughter Elizabeth. No mention is made of his meeting with Murdoch as House of Commons rules do not require members to disclose details of complimentary trips. A Spokesperson for Cameron stated that this was a 'social event', however, 'a Labour MP questioned whether Mr Cameron's entry in the register of interests was accurate and urged him to amend it to include his meeting with Mr Murdoch'. The Independent reports that 'Denis MacShane, a former Foreign Office minister, said: "First George Osborne, and now David Cameron, have made a mockery of the idea of transparency, disclosure and accountability for senior politicians as they seek to sell their party and discuss their financial affairs with rich foreigners."'

The report also pointed out that Cameron has faced 'criticism after he was photographed by the press during an earlier "bucket and spade" family holiday in Cornwall. Critics said that was a "pseudo holiday" and that his real one was with his wealthy relatives and their friends in Turkey'.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting 2008

In January 2008, David Cameron participated in the World Economic Forum's annual meeting at Davos as a speaker. The House of Commons Register of Interests lists hospitality, car use, a conference pass and 'hospitality' being supplied by the Forum, with flights and accomodations supplied by the Conservative Party..

Fracking cheerleader

Cameron has declared avid support for the development of fracking in the UK despite major protests at sites across the country in 2013. By January 2014 he was describing opponents as 'irrational' and stated that his government was 'going all out for shale'. Cameron announced financial incentives for councils and local communities, labelled bribes by opponents.

David Cameron and the Israel Lobby

2009 Speech to the Conservative Friends of Israel

David Cameron was the main speaker at the Conservative Friends of Israel annual lunch on the 18 June 2009. Cameron neglected to mention that six months prior to his speech, Israel began a 23-day bombardment of Gaza that led to the deaths of around 1,400 people including hundreds of children. Not only did David Cameron neglect to mention the “operation cast lead” bombardment of Gaza but he described how “Israel strives to protect innocent life – Hamas target innocent life” . The Conservative Party leader emphasised the need for the Palestinians to relinquish the use of violence arguing that:

“for the Palestinians themselves, their obligations are clear: Prove you are a reliable negotiating partner. Bring order to your own society. And renounce violence completely” .

Poju Zabludowicz donations

London billionaire Poju Zabludowicz who made his fortune from the arms trade and property is one of the biggest funders of the Israel Lobby in the UK bankrolling the Israel Lobby group BICOM and helping to fund the Conservative Friends of Israel. Zabludowicz has property interests in an illegal settlement in the West Bank. Peter Oborne's investigation into the UK Israel lobby uncovered that Zabludowicz has a stake in a shopping centre in Ma’ale Adumim, which the journalist describes as:

a settlement which is seen as strategically crucial in ensuring Jerusalem remains in Israeli hands. So much so that Netanyahu launched his election campaign in the settlement in 2005. “Starting my campaign here is not coincidental [it is] because Jerusalem is in danger.”

Ma'ale Adumim lies on a hill east of Jerusalem and is considered to be an illegal settlement under international law .

Poju Zabludowicz has donated funds to David Cameron through his firm Tamares Real Estate Investments. Peter Oborne described the development of their relationship:

In September 2005 when Cameron was planning his Conservative leadership election campaign he met Zabludowicz for a coffee. Zabludowicz was suitably impressed with what he heard, and Cameron received £15,000 from Zabludowicz over the course of his election campaign. To ensure that the donations complied with election law, he made the donations through his British subsidiary Tamares Real Estate Investments.

Cameron and Neoconservatism

David Cameron criticised neoconservatism in a September 2008 speech in Pakistan:

"We should accept that we cannot impose democracy at the barrel of a gun; that we cannot drop democracy from 10,000 feet and we shouldn't try.

"Put crudely, that was what was wrong with the 'neocon' approach and why I am a liberal Conservative, not a neoconservative."

"A liberal Conservative approach recognises that democracy must be built around the institutions, habits and culture of each country.

"Democracy should be the work of patient craftmanship and not of a uniform mass production line, if the final product is to be of a quality that endures."

Commentators such as Geoffrey Wheatcroft have nevertheless expressed concern about the neoconservatism of key shadow cabinet members such as Michael Gove:

And yet Gove – who is "happy to be called a neocon" – insists that Cameron has "given the strongest possible support for our mission in Afghanistan", which is "part of a broader struggle against Islamist fundamentalism". Those words must make anyone despair, and certainly think twice about voting Tory.

The Spectator's David Blackburn suggested this overstated neoconservative influence in the shadow cabinet:

Gove and G[eo]rge Osborne are neocons, but they “stay silent” on foreign policy issues in public, suggesting that theirs is the minority view within the leadership and the party as a whole.

Registered interests

The House of Commons Register of Interests includes the following for Cameron in its 2008/2009 edition:

Helicopter and private plane travel from:

• JCB Research
• Harris Ventures Ltd
• IPGL Ltd
• Henfield Lodge Aviation Ltd, London
• William Cook Holdings, Sheffield
• CQS, London
• Bearwood Corporate Services Ltd, Southampton
• Matthew Freud
• David Ross

Accomodation from the Cardiff Business Club following a speech made by Cameron to the Club at their annual dinner event.

A selection of gifts from U.S. President George W Bush, Lord Harris of Peckham, Mohammed Galadari, the Sultan of Brunei and Mian Muhammad Nazaz Sharif of the Pakistan Muslim League (former Prime Minister of Pakistan).

In December 2007, Cameron, his Chief of Staff and three Conservative Campaign Headquarters members visited China where they received flights, accommodation, transport and a translator from the International Liaison Department of the Chinese Communist Party.

Memorable quotes

"Every generation has to fight and win the argument for free trade and open markets."

DebkaFile, an Israeli right-wing website that often quotes Israeli intelligence officers, reports:

In an question-answer session at the Conservative Friends of Israel, Cameron said: "If what you mean by Zionist, someone who believes that the Jews have a right to a homeland in Israel and a right to their country then yes, I am a Zionist and I’m proud of the fact that Conservative politicians down the ages have played a huge role in helping to bring this about." The Conservative went on to say: There is something deep in our party’s DNA that believes in Israel, the right of Israel to exist, the right of Israel to defend itself and that a deal should only happen if it means that Israel is really allowed to have peace within secure borders and real guarantees about its future."

Contact, References and Resources

Resources

• Neil Clark, 'Cameron is no moderate: He supports the Iraq war and tax cuts, opposes EU social policies and has neocon associations', The Guardian, 24 October 2005.