The political education of David Cameron

Eighty years ago this week, the institution in which David Cameron and his closest lieutenants learned their trade was born. The press is fascinated by his membership of the Bullingdon Club, but Cameron owes a thousand times more to the apprenticeship he served in the Conservative Research Department.

How dreary those words sound, and how modest the press release on 17 November 1929 announcing the foundation of the new body: ‘In view of the growing complexity of the political aspect of modern industrial, Imperial and social problems, Mr Stanley Baldwin has decided to set up a special department charged with the task of organising and conducting research into these matters.’

But the ambitions which lay behind CRD were anything but modest. Neville Chamberlain, at whose urging it was created and who remained in charge of it until his death in November 1940, used it to develop the measures closest to his own heart: an ambitious programme ‘to elevate the condition of the people’.