Seven hundred pages of memoir is stretching it a bit even for an ex-inhabitant of No. 10 with David Cameron’s need for self-justification. Halfway through For the Record I was tempted to skip a chapter or two, but then I encountered a passage that made the slog worthwhile. Talking about his relationship with the Queen, her 12th prime minister notes two essentials in preparing for the weekly audience. First check the BBC news headlines because she is always formidably well informed. Second get up to speed on what is happening in the horse-racing world. (He used to check with his bloodstock agent friend Tom Goff whether one of her horses had won that week or one of her mares had foaled.) The week after Cameron’s father died, the monarch even enquired of a completely flummoxed Prime Minister whether the late Cameron senior’s horse was running at Windsor that evening. It was.
Ruminating on the pleasures of the regular weekend at Balmoral in September, a candid Cameron confesses:
Every year I was asked whether I would like to fish for salmon, shoot grouse, ride one of the Queen’s Highland ponies or go red-deer-stalking. I love doing all those things but I had to cut down on country sports after becoming Conservative leader in 2005. I had enough problems dealing with the ‘posh’ accusation without being photographed with a gun in one hand and a dead bird in the other.
He indulged in all, except the stalking. Once, in Reykjavik, I rode one of Iceland’s special breed of ponies some years after any previous experience in the saddle. So I could sympathise with Cameron’s comment on the particularly broad backs of the Queen’s hard-working ponies: ‘After two hours exploring the hills and glens around Balmoral I would be walking like John Wayne for a week.
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