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Words Pop Out of his MouthThe Corrupt Nature of David Cameron
In light of the former Prime Minister’s involvement in the Greensill affair, here is chapter eight of Anthony Barnett’s 2017 book The Lure of Greatness: England’s Brexit and America’s Trump, explaining why Cameron does not have a normal belief in right and wrong and says whatever he thinks will work, and the personal background essential to understanding his role in the current corruption scandal
What kind of person carries the responsibility for the referendum and its outcome under whose influence all in Britain now live; what were David Cameron’s political qualities and flaws, and how could someone like him come to run the government in the first place?
No exercise in asking why Brexit happened can avoid the unpleasant task of delving into these questions, as he came to personify the country’s 40-year relationship with the EU and thereby contributed to its rejection.
Before he announced the referendum, Cameron informed his then coalition deputy, the Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg, of his intention. Clegg challenged him on the risks and recounts how: “I was breezily told that all would be well, of course it would be won.” To call a referendum is one thing – the long-standing heavy weather system of British politics pushed persistently in its direction. The breezy casualness of Cameron is something else.
That he could even pretend to face down the storm he would unleash with his light-hearted windiness points to the question that matters. It does not concern the ‘real’ David Cameron, which is a distraction of celebrity individualism; it covers the source and nature of his political judgement. Where did his calamitously superficial self-assurance come from?
For it is not the case that because Cameron is superficial he is insignificant. His single-minded personal ambition and well-manicured slipperiness may make him a lightweight in the story compared to the big narrative figures such as the UK’s Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, or George W. Bush and the Clintons (Bill and Hillary) in the USA. But the man without baggage was the perfect traveller. He took the capacity for self-interested adaptation for which the English ruling class is famous to a new pitch of rootlessness and distilled the era’s deceitful spirit of government to perfection.
Revealing Incidents
Westminster’s culture is short-term: it judges by outcomes and forgives wrongdoing if it succeeds. It is all very well to show, as I have just done, that Cameron was wretchedly instrumental in his approach to the defining issue of national identity, saying that the EU was merely a means to an end. But the referendum was close. He nearly pulled it off. To accuse him of being opportunist, even on an issue as important as EU policy, invites the reply that it might have worked, in which case he would be admired for his mastery of the moment.
But I believe the failure of Cameron’s referendum stems from his entire approach to power, and that this was bound up with the intrinsic duplicity of his politics. Furthermore, his manipulative approach linked the referendum to a chain of political and financial scandals, the sleaze, corruptions, duplicities and unearned privileges that defined the way all three main parties, Labour and Lib Dem and Tory, had governed Britain since the downfall of Margaret Thatcher.
Indeed, even as Thatcher swept away ‘old boy’ privileges, she prepared the way for the new corruption with her sale of arms to Iraq; the Pergau Dam scandal that the senior civil servant Tim Lancaster refused to sign off; and the Al-Yamamah arms deal that benefited her son Mark, just to name three instances. As a consequence, the passion of those who supported Brexit drew strength from widespread anger with the rotten, selfish way the country is governed and Cameron’s leadership tempted voters to use the referendum to reject the way Westminster politics has been conducted.
Cameron is one of those politicians who enjoy unlimited personal ambition untroubled by the burden of larger purpose. He was shameless in his desire to counterfeit himself as a courteous one-nation leader who loves his country. A telling incident reveals his desolate professionalism.
In the run-up to the 2015 election, he was sent a private poll that showed only one voter in three thought he was in touch with ordinary people. He circulated it to his team with a note at the top: “Please, operational grid, give me the right language and speaking and physically attack me with the right words before an interview. I will do whatever I am told.” Can you imagine a Theresa May, a Donald Trump, a Nigel Farage, a Boris Johnson, a Jeremy Corbyn or a Nicola Sturgeon requiring their aides to “attack” them with “the right words”?
In certain narrow circumstances, perhaps, if asking for a better way to present a given argument that they believe in, or to improve the way to strengthen a case. But they would never promise to do “whatever” they are told to say in general. Whereas, after five years as Prime Minister, Cameron tells his team he’ll say anything to make it appear that he is touch, and instructs them to devise the language. The note reveals both his unrestrained ambition and lack of larger purpose.
Another incident, telling because apparently trivial, reveals the scale of his inner abyss: he forgot the name of his football team. As a man’s identification with his football team is made early and for life; it is a form of destiny harder to forget than the name of your partner, should you have one. Yet Cameron, giving a speech in praise of Britain’s ethnic diversity, told his audience he supported West Ham. He had to correct the record by comparing himself to the leader of the Green Party: “I had what Natalie Bennett described as a brain fade. I’m a Villa fan… I must have been overcome by something.”
Quizzed about it on Sky News, Cameron said: “By the time you have made as many speeches as I have on this campaign all sorts of funny things start popping out of your mouth.” If his then opponent, the Labour leader Ed Miliband, had told a TV interviewer that funny things popped out of his mouth, the Mail, the Telegraph and the Sun would have rubbed it into public consciousness. As this was an election in which Cameron was their candidate, his embarrassment was conveniently forgotten.
We too can ignore the gaffe – what is revealing is his justification. Anyone can make a slip of the tongue, but nobody who cares about what they say would tell a broadcaster that all sorts of things pop out of their mouth. The reason why an election campaign puts you under such pressure is because everything you say counts.
Downright Lies
Sometimes Cameron’s words were remembered. If rarely by the London media, in one case at least by Barack Obama. In 2011, Britain joined France in attacking the Libyan dictator Gaddafi after he threatened to wipe out, street by street, those who opposed him in his country’s second city, Benghazi. The US eliminated Gaddafi’s air defences, then the British and French air forces successfully supported the dictator’s overthrow. The UK spent £320 million on the bombing. With less than 10 million people, plentiful oil and no threatening neighbours, Libya offered a chance to show how Western military intervention could lead to constructive outcome for local people.
David Cameron flew into Benghazi in triumph and pledged passionately to the crowd, with his words broadcast by the BBC, that Britain “will stand with you as you build your country and build your democracy for the future”. A mere £25 million in aid followed, less than 8% of what the UK spent on bombing. The country fell apart. The betrayal enraged the American President, who broke diplomatic convention to publicly rebuke the UK’s premier, telling Jeffrey Goldberg of Atlantic magazine: “When I go back and I ask myself what went wrong… there’s room for criticism.” He accepted some of the fault was his and then singled out Cameron who, in Obama’s words, stopped paying attention as he became “distracted by a range of other things”.
It was criminal negligence, but it concerned a foreign country. The British Prime Minister’s indifference turned to dishonesty at home when it concerned the central platform of his economic policy. In a 2014 party conference speech, Cameron described Britain as “a country that is paying down its debts”. This was false. More important, Andrew Dilnot, chair of the UK Statistics Authority, officially confirmed that it was false. The annual additional amount the Government was borrowing, known as the deficit, was in decline, but total debt was rising. It was an extraordinary falsehood because Cameron had already been officially rebuked for making the same claim the year before, this time in a party-political broadcast. Cameron claimed: “We’re paying down Britain’s debts.” It prompted fury from Andreas Whittam Smith, founder of the Independent. He pointed out that, as Prime Minister, he could not but have known that while he had been in office, “public sector net debt has expanded from £811.3 billion (55.3% of GDP) to £1,111.4 billion (70.7% of GDP)”.
A party-political broadcast is a deliberate act, not something said on the spur of the moment. Every word and every image is carefully considered. The deceit about paying down the debt will have been in the script for days or even weeks. The Prime Minister is better placed than almost anyone to know what the truth actually is.
Had it really come to this? Had the Prime Minister of the day solemnly addressed the British people and deliberately, coldly, with aforethought, told them a downright lie? If so, what scorn for the electorate that implied. What insufferable arrogance.
Broken Promises
Scorn for voters helped win David Cameron the premiership. In January 2010, in the run-up to that year’s election, he said: “We’ve looked at educational maintenance allowances and we haven’t announced any plan to get rid of them. We don’t have any plans to get rid of them” – only for them to be scrapped five months after he won.
In March 2010, Cameron made a promise: “I wouldn’t change child benefit, I wouldn’t means-test it, I don’t think that is a good idea” – within three years, means testing was introduced.
In April 2010, on the eve of the election, Cameron said: “We have absolutely no plans to raise VAT” – two months later, it was raised from 17.5% to 20%. (The previous year, Cameron had argued that VAT is “very regressive, it hits the poorest hardest”).
In 2006, Cameron repositioned the entire Tory Party to make it environmentalist, even rebranding the party’s logo to a tree. He made ‘Vote Blue, Go Green’ one of his election slogans. In 2013, he told aides working on energy legislation: “Get rid of all the green crap.”
His most pitiless dishonesty concerned the NHS, the institution British voters care about more than any other. In a 2009 speech to the Royal College of Pathologists, Cameron pledged: “There will be no more of the tiresome, meddlesome, top-down restructures that have dominated the last decade of the NHS.” It was a promise he repeated: the NHS would be safe in his hands. If any single commitment swung him the election in 2010, this was the one. As he was repeating his pledges, his team were preparing the Lansley reforms to marketise the NHS – a top-down reorganisation that was to be described by the chief executive of the NHS as a restructuring “so big you can see it from space”.
To convince voters of his sincerity, Cameron deployed the experience of his badly disabled son: “For me, it is not just a question of saying the NHS is safe in my hands – of course it will be. My family is so often in the hands of the NHS, so I want them to be safe there.” In the same fraudulent speech, he promised “no more pointless and disruptive reorganisations”. As for being safe in his hands, in 2010 when he won office, figures for NHS England showed a total of 144,000 beds. As the population rose, this number fell to 130,000. He inherited from Blair spending on the NHS of 8.8% of the country’s GDP and a New Labour commitment that it would rise to equal EU averages, then 10.5%. Instead, it fell back to 6.6% and “the gap between us and our European neighbours” was “growing”.
The pitiless nature of Cameron’s politics is most starkly revealed by the way he manipulated voters’ hopes and desires with respect to the NHS. Often, people cannot believe that powerful politicians are wicked humans because policies seem impersonal. A vignette of a face-to-face encounter brings home the awfulness of Cameron’s moral vacuum more powerfully than even the Libyan betrayal.
Jamie Reed was the Labour MP for Copeland in Cumbria from 2005 to 2017. He published a brief reflection of his highs and lows in Parliament. Cameron was the low point: “For most people, politicians exist on the edge of their peripheral vision. But there are times of crisis when this vision is shattered and politicians are brought into sharp focus. This focus rests upon the character, wisdom and judgement of the politician in question… the lowest point of my political career took place on 2nd June 2010 when a gunman killed 12 people and shot and injured a further 11 in my constituency.
“In 2005, I ran on a promise of building a new hospital. The following five years saw the last Labour Government provide the money and begin the foundations of the new hospital and the demolition of the old hospital was under way before the coalition came into power in 2010. On entering office, Cameron and Osborne scrapped the new hospital building in my constituency, despite the hospital being half knocked down… In the midst of the shootings, I invited David Cameron to the hospital, to see how effectively it had operated in response to events, but also to convince him to reinstate the money for the new hospital project.
“I sat by the bed of a constituent, a gunshot victim, as she spoke with the Prime Minister and pleaded with him to return the funding and to safeguard local hospital services. He promised to do that… How I wish Cameron had honoured his promise. How I regret giving him the benefit of the doubt. How sad I was, over the following months and years, to be constantly reminded of the way in which the Prime Minister had revealed his character during the time at which my community needed its Prime Minister the most.
“Today, I remain furious at the way in which, when character, integrity, honesty and compassion were called for, the Prime Minister filled this void with a calculated deception told to a gunshot victim in a hospital bed. Not simply the low point of my parliamentary career, this episode remains one of the low points of my life.”
Ruling Supremacy
Sometimes people get what they deserve. The most fateful of all of David Cameron’s dishonesties delivered the justice of expelling him from office.
It was the pledge, set out in the Tory Party’s 2010 election manifesto, to “take steps to take net migration back to the levels of the 1990s – tens of thousands a year, not hundreds of thousands”. Five years later, admitting that it had not worked, the 2015 manifesto pledged: “We will keep our ambition of delivering annual net migration in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of thousands.” Cameron knew it was not in his power to achieve such low figures. He signed-off on the words because they would help him win. Race relations in Britain have been poisoned ever since.
Melissa Kite published a mocking diary about Cameron’s Notting Hill set for the right-wing weekly magazine, the Spectator. She knew him well. After he resigned, she wrote: “In office, Cameron abandoned so many commitments it became impossible to chart the U-turns. My own personal favourite… was his supposedly heartfelt declaration on the BBC’s Countryfile, that he would no more ruin the countryside by building on it than put at risk his own family. Months later, rural communities were complaining about Government-backed attempts to build on the green belt… he would say one thing and the result would be the exact opposite.”
In the summer of 2015, John Sewel was Deputy Speaker of the House of Lords and chairman of the Lords’ Privileges and Conduct Committee – the body that upholds standards of behaviour among peers, for which he was paid £120,000 a year. This allowed him to discuss the qualities of the country’s political leaders while snorting hard drugs in the company of two prostitutes. He also invited them to join him later in the autumn for dinner in the House of Lords, where he would doubtless have continued with his sharp insights on the denizens of Westminster, had the pair not recorded the episode and sold it to Murdoch’s Sun. The video of the occasion is online, viewed more than 1.7 million times, and it was given front-page treatment in the tabloid. Such is elite political life in Britain.
Sewel’s insider view of Cameron was as succinct as his line of cocaine: “He’s the most facile, superficial Prime Minister there has ever been… he just shoots from the hip and makes one-off commitments he cannot deliver on.”
Yet for six years, Cameron was regarded as a successful premier. He made people think he was born to lead and usually appeared to know how to strike the ‘right note’. The clichéd explanation of this facility reinforced by Britain’s class-obsessed media is that it comes from Cameron’s privileged, upper-class origins in Eton and Oxford. He is a toff. His breezy complacency comes from his elite presumption of superiority. In the end, it was his sense of entitlement that distanced him from reality – and meant he could be laid low in the EU Referendum by horny-handed ex-workers and frustrated petty-bourgeois.
He took the capacity for self-interested adaptation for which the English ruling class is famous to a new pitch of rootlessness and distilled the era’s deceitful spirit of government to perfection
That such a view is fashionable signals the superficiality of a London milieu that Cameron himself is part of, one which has wiped history from its memory card. For the British ruling class was always extremely wary of the danger to its supremacy posed by the lowest and middling classes. Through war, religion, manufacturing, monarchy and trade, generations of Etonians and Oxford alumni, by hard work as well as instinct, were trained to protect themselves and the country they commanded from the populace.
After enormous demonstrations, Disraeli gave the franchise to the male heads of skilled working-class households in 1867. Almost immediately a permanent Civil Service was installed. It was designed to ensure that the machinery of the state remains in the hands of trustworthy mandarins from good schools, should government ever fall into the hands of an unschooled, working-class party. The device became one of the most lasting checks against popular dictatorship built into the UK’s informal constitution. I mention it only to illustrate the long-standing nature and seriousness of upper-class Britain. When it comes to permitting the exercise of power by the subordinate classes, not only do you take action to prevent it, you pre-empt even the possibility by thinking decades ahead, just as you landscape your estates for future generations.
Cameron’s blithe upturning of this long tradition was not a sign of his toffness but of his failure to absorb the practical wisdom of his class. When tradition mattered, he embraced trendiness, instead of imperial substance he embraced commercial messaging. His modern style, superficiality and ultimate catastrophic failure come from his having abandoned Establishment politics and the traditions of Eton, in favour of a global corporate culture, with its single-minded dedication to marketing, public relations and immediate returns.
PR World
David Cameron became an MP at the age of 36. After five post-Oxford years in the Conservative Party research department, aged 27 he joined Carlton Communications, which he left to enter Parliament seven years later in 2001. Within four years, he was his party’s leader and, five years after that, aged 43, Prime Minister.
In this short time, his most formative experience was working as director of corporate communications at Carlton for its then ferocious boss Michael Green, variously described as “vile” and “a horror”. Green was building his media empire, where Cameron himself was remembered as “a PR man capable of dissembling and doling out disinformation”. Over the turn of the century, the Cameron who was to lead Britain had himself re-forged by the pressures of London’s and possibly the world’s most brutal, short-term, commercial environment, as it chased the fortunes of an exploding mass media.
Cameron certainly enjoyed the advantages of his privileged schooling and stockbroker background. But the seven biblical years he was trained as a corporate, media and public relations operator were more important than five years at Eton for turning his inheritance into a political career. He is the product of his shameful profession much more than of his once arguably honourable background.
Like so many of us, Cameron is a modern migrant, not a stay-at-home. Most politicians are. The snobbish hypostatisation of a person’s origin as being their identity, as if we lived in a Hindu caste system, blights public perception in England. The example of Margaret Thatcher is a good illustration.
Once again thanks to Britain’s obsession with class, she is seen as being what she was born as: a provincial grocer’s daughter. That, however, was when she was Margaret Roberts. Dennis Thatcher was a very successful, hard-working businessman who became a millionaire and then a director of Burma Oil. She took his name, lived with his cheerful racism, and part of her confidence and approach to the economy were rooted in becoming his wife. It was not without personal anxiety, but as a young woman she married into wealth, security and a business perspective that were far from those of a small-town grocer and more important for her politics.
Like her, Cameron’s approach to politics was shaped, not by what he was, but by what he became in his 20s. He too was someone who wanted to slip the coils of his family, not represent it. But whereas the Thatchers, politician and businessman, fought to break out of the disastrous situation Britain faced in the late 1960s, suffocated by a consensus that embraced decline and protected vested interests, Cameron and his wife hit London when the town was on a roll.
Their early adulthood was marked by expansion, not calamity, as London became the playground of globalisation, where those with money could hardly avoid making shedloads more. One example is Cameron’s mother-in-law, Lady Astor, who moved from retail jewellery to co-found OKA in 1999, the global luxury home-furnishing chain. A better one is her daughter and his wife, Samantha Cameron. She joined Smythsons, the exclusive Bond Street stationery outlet, as its product development director in 1996, aged 25, and took part in a management buy-out two years later. In 2005, it was sold on to a consortium for £15.5 million.
The question for the young Tory, David Cameron, with his ambition in politics, was not how to save his country, in this case from the glaring corruption, lack of democracy and the unfairness of globalisation – which would have been the project of a true Conservative. It was how to shake-off his roots in his country’s past to ride the ‘new future’ for all it was worth.
Carlton Television under Michael Green was, I’ve been told, among the worst of London’s media companies. The year Cameron joined to become Green’s senior communications executive it was officially censured for its “glib and superficial” output by the broadcasting standards regulator. At one point, the London Evening Standard’s television critic wrote about what was then the future Prime Minister’s home from home: “What is the difference between Carlton TV and a bucket of shit? Answer: The bucket.”
Cameron’s job was to deal with financial journalists, reporting on Carlton’s fate in the media marketplace. One of them, Jeff Randall, who served on the Telegraph when it was a serious broadsheet, was appalled to see him bid for the Conservative leadership and wrote: “In my experience, Cameron never gave a straight answer when dissemblance was a plausible alternative, which probably makes him perfectly suited for the role he now seeks: the next Tony Blair.”
Another, Ian King, the Sun’s business editor in 2005, told his readers that Cameron “would not cut it” as party leader: “Along with other financial journalists, I was unfortunate enough to have dealings with Cameron during the 1990s when he was PR man for Carlton, the world’s worst television company. And a poisonous, slippery individual he was, too. Back then, Cameron was far from the smoothie he pretends to be now. He was a smarmy bully… he loved humiliating people.”
The consensus is that Michael Green was a monstrous figure at Carlton TV. After he left and started his political career, Cameron told an interviewer how Green was an “inspirational, swashbuckling entrepreneur… I learned from him how to get things done, how to lead with conviction”.
There was a real transformation taking place within the golden bubble of London’s expansion. Those who were building businesses, developing policies, creating programmes, making works of art, even starting websites, were genuine entrepreneurs in their efforts, as the first wave of the digital transformation swept the analogue world. But this hard work was represented, in the best and worst senses of that word, by the black arts of PR.
Since the financial crash of 2008, we may have gained some understanding of the parasitic character of the financial sector. The nature of the cultural bubble that accompanied the lopsided growth of financial capitalism is less well understood: the growth of junk messaging, junk art and junk television that accompanied junk bonds. This was Cameron’s cultural milieu.
The development of modern advertising and marketing in the 1920s preceded the first great crash. In the 1990s, marketing became globalised. Its images and messages floated, digitised and dissociated even further from historic notions of reality, as people’s image became more important to them than themselves. The first principle in the politics of this meta-defining universe was not to ‘mean’ what you say in the old-fashioned way. In its space, what a message says lies in the external impact, not its content. Success is truth. Language must be lubricated to escape the friction of boring accountability that might interrupt its intended impression.
So, if a journalist asks a politician or businessperson about something that went wrong, the best response is not to feel accountable but to be able to say with all sincerity that the story ‘no longer has legs’. The objective is always tomorrow’s perceptions, to keep ‘the narrative’ on the move; deploying misleading sincerity and ‘unintended’ lying. The master was Tony Blair, who showed that only those with unhinged self-belief can thrive in such an airless environment. Step forward David Cameron.
Dreams and Nightmares
In the 2001 election, two wealthy, well-educated young MPs were elected to the Conservative benches. While most of the Tory Party was thrashing around with impotent anti-European spasms and homophobic nostalgia for the era of Thatcherite sadomasochism, they grasped that the Labour premier was showing the way out of their impasse. His example offered a path for the right: socially tolerant, at ease with the world of money, confidently dismissive of the restraints of convention and ruthlessly focused on the exercise of power. These two were David Cameron and George Osborne.
On the eve of his bid for the leadership in 2005, after a mere four years on the opposition benches, Cameron said one true thing: “I am the heir to Blair.”
It was the evening before the leadership contest at the Conservatives’ 2005 conference. The party had just lost its third election in a row and there were five candidates in contention. David Cameron and his collaborator George Osborne attended a Telegraph-hosted ‘dinner with newspaper executives’. Cameron told them he was “the heir to Blair”. Andrew Pierce of The Times, reported: “If his hosts were in any doubt about what they had heard, Mr Cameron repeated the mantra.” In addition, “Mr Osborne, defending the heir to Blair boast, said ‘we have nothing to be ashamed of in saying it’.”
Cameron and Osborne wanted the people who mattered to know that their objective was to steer Britain’s most ancient political party into the tail wind of Blair’s Labour Government, so as to inherit the mantle of his manipulative corporate populism.
Cameron then gave a speech of pitch-perfect Blairism in his bid for the leadership: “I want people to feel good about being a Conservative again… That’s what I mean by change: we’ve got to change our culture so we look, feel, think and behave like a completely new organisation. By changing our culture we can change politics, too. When I meet young people, they tell me how sick they are of the whole political system – the shouting, finger-pointing, backbiting and point-scoring in the House of Commons. That’s all got to go. So let’s build together a new generation of Conservatives. Let’s switch a new generation on to Conservative ideas. Let’s dream a new generation of Conservative dreams… We can lead that new generation. We can be that new generation, changing our party to change our country. It will be an incredible journey. I want you to come with me.”
Only someone as limitlessly ambitious but completely lacking in originality as Cameron could have so perfectly adapted himself to the Blairite project. His public relations expertise allowed him to internalise the Blair approach so flawlessly that he prefigured the master’s own language.
Six years later, Blair titled his account of his politics A Journey. Movement without a principled objective, with all the excitement of novelty and, most important, a single leader who pointed ‘the way’, became the prospectus offered the country by Cameron, just as it had been by Blair. It would become the Tories’ turn to switch on a new generation with their ‘ideas’.
As a political vision, it was not so much a journey as a trip: a hallucination of frictionless futurism, a free-market high. The unstated implication is that those who do not ‘get’ the incredible transformation are lethargic spoilers – old or old before their time. None more so than those who resisted globalisation, including Britain’s membership of the European Union.
In this feel-good political culture, tangible choices were dissolved by post-honest language. Many railed against the false radicalism and injustice it perpetrated and permitted, especially on the left. When the response finally exploded it came not from that flank, where Blairism and Cameron had invested most of their protective armour, but from the right, after the financial crash exposed their illusions.
This chapter is dedicated to Anthony Barnett’s much-missed agent, Felicity Bryan, who rang him after reading it to say that she couldn’t sleep because she was so angry