True blue new boy

Biography The Tories in 2005 - humiliated by a third successive election defeat - chose David Cameron because they thought he…

BiographyThe Tories in 2005 - humiliated by a third successive election defeat - chose David Cameron because they thought he would make a charismatic and dynamic opposition leader.

Young and telegenic, he would contrast pleasingly with the dour British prime minister-in-waiting, Gordon Brown, and carry forward a modernising agenda. Few if any thought he might win the next election. Fifteen months later his lead in opinion polls is so commanding that Labour MPs are now asking each other whether they should dump Brown and go for David Miliband as PM, because the latter might be "their" Cameron. It is no surprise then, as the political pendulum shows signs of swinging from red to blue, that supporters and opponents alike are beginning to ask: "Just who is David Cameron?"

Cameron: The Rise of the New Conservative, an excellent first full biography, goes some considerable way towards answering that question. The authors - Francis Elliott and James Hanning - are both political journalists, and between them they share Cameron's Eton and Oxford background. This biography offers a hugely enjoyable and pacily written insider's account of the rise of Cameron. The authors manage not to get too close to their subject, but they clearly rather like and admire him, and they give us a good insight into why he has risen so high so fast. They make no claims to salacious revelations, including about drug usage, on which they conclude that (unless Cameron is playing a very dangerous game) there is nothing further to come out.

That Cameron is a child of the Establishment is hardly in doubt. The last three Conservative prime ministers have been, successively, the son of a builder (Heath), the daughter of a grocer (Thatcher) and the son of a garden-gnome manufacturer (Major). Cameron's world of boarding schools, country weekends, aristocratic in-laws, old money, and membership of White's Club - "if you have to ask how much, you can't afford to join" - is a return to the more privileged world of pre-1965 Tory leaders, namely Churchill (grandson of a duke), Eden (son of a baronet), Macmillan (heir to a publishing empire) and the 14th earl of Home.

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Elliott and Hanning make it clear that Cameron has always had the easy charm and grand seigniorial manner so typical of his class. Added to this are a natural cleverness and a phenomenal capacity for hard work (the latter well-hidden to uphold the pose of effortless ease). Oxford, for example, may have been a time to enjoy the infamous excesses of the Bullingdon Club, but it was also when Cameron got a first class degree.

YET NONE OF this makes Cameron particularly unique. What seems to have added mettle to a bright if conventional character, the authors argue, is the experience of being father to Ivan, a child so severely disabled that he literally cannot be left alone for even a moment. For Cameron there was a "big change in his nature" that saw him go from "a posh narrow-minded twat from Eton" to a man who could feel "personal empathy with people whose lives have not gone as they would have liked".

What Elliott and Hanning's rewarding biography cannot tell us is whether Cameron has the ability to make an authoritative prime minister. Much has been made of the fact that he has yet to set out his programme in clear terms, but this is unimportant as an indicator of future success. The best-prepared Conservative prime minister in recent British history was Edward Heath, whose short premiership was an ignominious failure. Margaret Thatcher, by contrast, won in 1979 promising very little, yet went on to dominate an era.

Cameron: The Rise of the New Conservative suggests that throughout his life the current leader of the Conservative party has tended to be underestimated. "Politics is not a flat race, it's a steeplechase," Churchill once told Harold Macmillan - himself an Eton and Oxford man. We do not know whether David Cameron will be first past the post. What we can say for certain is that thus far he has easily cleared his fences.

Richard Aldous is head of history and archives at UCD. His most recent book, published last year, is The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs Disraeli

Cameron: The Rise of the New Conservative By Francis Elliott and James Hanning Fourth Estate, 342pp. £18.99