When I was at Eton, many years before David Cameron, much of the school was run by a self-elected society known as ‘Pop’.
When I was at Eton, many years before David Cameron, much of the school was run by a self-elected society known as ‘Pop’. Some members were elected ex officio; but the majority belonged because they stood well with the Society’s membership. Most members of ‘Pop’ in my day put me in mind of David Cameron now. The principal difference is that he is by a distance cleverer than they were.
However, the apparent social self- confidence and the toughness of mind and of spirit seem very familiar. It went with a certain cliquishness and a determination to be in charge. Those of us who never stood a chance of becoming members of ‘Pop’ used to call such people, no doubt with more than a touch of envy, ‘Honey and Flowers’, after a fashionable hair oil they favoured. It was not an apt name, because these gentlemen had needed a good deal more than sweetness and prettiness to reach Olympus. They had used toughness and ruthlessness as well.
It is a comfort to know that our next Prime Minister took his first political steps in such a hard school. Peter Snowdon’s book says little, except by implication, about the formidable task that awaits David Cameron, assuming that the British electorate does not commit national suicide on 6 May by re-electing Labour or by landing us with a hung Parliament. However, he does provide us with a well-researched, authoritative and workmanlike account of the Conservative Party’s brush with extinction after 1990. The book has another virtue: it is an easy read, taking us, with the help of much quotation from the dramatis personae themselves, through the whole extraordinary story.
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