Leisure and pleasure have always been Scylla and Charybdis for politicians. Vacation on a yacht called Monkey Business, borrow a Caribbean pile from a billionaire, spend time with Cliff Richard, and you’re tabloid toast. Not this lot. The Cameron and Clegg sets have steered through the whirlpools without hitting the rocks.
David Cameron, the 19th Prime Minister to have been to Eton, and his Westminster-educated deputy, Nick Clegg, are wealthy, healthy, educated and entitled. They have connections to crowned heads of Europe. But neither is taking the toff path. On paper at least — in the news pages of the dailies — they’re taking the high street, loading the boot of the Espace at Waitrose, dressed in Gap and Converse, somewhere in middle England.
It helps that this set don’t have stay-at-home spouses. They have high-achieving partners. Samantha Cameron, who has just given birth to her fourth child, revamped Smythson; Miriam Gonzalez Durantez is a top lawyer; Rachel Whetstone, wife of Steve Hilton, is a top Googler; Frances Osborne, Ffion Hague and Sarah Vine (Mrs Michael Gove) are bestselling authors. All give the impression that they could run the country as well as large households without breaking sweat. It’s all very modern, classless and compassionate.
Or is it? Cameron has never hidden the fact that as a youth he went out with the Heythrop, but hasn’t hunted ‘for years’. Well, ’appens I’ve spent a few days at his in-laws’ little place on Jura. It is a comfortable laird’s lodge by the sea, a tartan carpets, open fires, chintzy, floral-wallpaper kind of place. Heaven, in fact. I swam in the sea the first day. Bruce ‘Brute’ Anderson, who was also a guest, spied on me while I changed behind a rock.
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