David Cameron

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  David Cameron and Conservative renewal

  The limits of modernisation?

  • Gillian Peele, John Francis(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Manchester University Press

    (Publisher)

  1

  David Cameron’s leadership and party renewal

  Gillian Peele

  Writing on the tenth anniversary of David Cameron’s victory in the Conservative leadership election, Paul Goodman, the editor of the influential online site ConservativeHome, noted that on some measures Cameron’s decade in the leadership made him the second most successful Conservative leader in the last hundred years (ConservativeHome, 6 December 2015). Yet, as Goodman’s article also underlined, there is a sense in which Cameron’s leadership remains puzzling and problematic: for many observers his fundamental beliefs remained unclear. There is thus a sense that he was either echoing the title of the ConservativeHome article, something of a political chameleon or a leader with a series of differing, indeed contradictory, impulses. Nor is there any agreed interpretation of the effect of his leadership. In some ways he has succeeded brilliantly against the odds in renewing the Conservative Party, taking it back to a dominant position in the British political system and delivering, as a powerful prime minister, a style of governance which has restored Conservative governing credibility. For critics, however, there remains the question of how securely based these achievements are and what the historical verdict on Cameron’s leadership will be. As the United Kingdom entered a phase of acute internal controversy over the impact of leaving the European Union, the legacy of his leadership for the longer-term future of the Conservative Party is far from certain.

  This chapter explores the relationship between David Cameron’s leadership, including those contradictory impulses and tensions, and the revitalisation of the Conservative Party, the renewal that is the subject of this book. Academic interest in leadership, and especially in political leadership, has burgeoned in recent years (Rhodes and t’Hart, 2014 ). Leadership is a multidimensional concept involving the interaction of individuals and the context in which they operate. That interaction in turn raises a host of questions which will continue to challenge scholars in the field (for an excellent overview see Elgie, 2015 ). For the limited purposes of this chapter, three points from the leadership literature should be borne in mind at this stage. The first is the difficulty of providing a comprehensive and objective account of the personality, skills, traits and other factors which are displayed by an individual leader and determining how, if at all, they have shaped his or her actions. This difficulty is acute for the study both of historical figures and contemporary figures. In the case of living politicians, especially if they are still in office, the problem is compounded by the likelihood that perspectives on that leader may be subjective or self-interested, biased or partial and (inevitably) short-term and incomplete. Biographical studies which may provide an important source of understanding are likely to suffer from these limitations. Thus the available studies of David Cameron are useful but necessarily flawed in some respect. An early study of Cameron originally written in 2007 while containing many useful insights takes the analysis only up to 2012 (Elliott and Hanning 2007 ; 2nd ed., 2012). Two excellent recent studies (which had at least some cooperation from officials) focus on Cameron’s role in government concentrating on the period of Coalition. Although largely positive about Cameron’s role, they are cautious in their judgments about how history will judge him and effectively take the story up until 2015. The study by Lord Ashcroft (a former Party treasurer and co-chairman) and journalist Isabel Oakeshott did not enjoy official cooperation and has to be read against the background of a less than happy relationship between Ashcroft and Cameron (Ashcroft and Oakeshott, 2015

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  The Prime Ministers

  Reflections on Leadership from Wilson to Johnson

  • Steve Richards(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Atlantic Books

    (Publisher)

  8

  David Cameron

  David Cameron will be recalled as the prime minister that took the UK out of the EU, against his own wishes. Cameron possessed a sunnier personality than most leaders and yet his ending was uniquely dark. All the modern prime ministers left office with much to be gloomy about, and in some cases they despaired for the remainder of their lives. But the chaos unleashed on so many fronts by Cameron’s decision to hold a referendum, and then lose it, was a uniquely bleak legacy. The nightmare of Iraq would still have happened if Blair had boldly opposed the war, because the US administration was determined to invade. Thatcher’s poll tax was addressed by abolition. But Brexit became never-ending, sucking up all political energy for years to come. As with all modern prime ministers, the seeds were sown at the beginning. Cameron’s referendum was not an aberration, but part of a pattern. Even as he fought what seemed like a distinctively refreshing leadership campaign in 2005, he was moving towards his fall.

  David Cameron was only thirty-nine when he became leader of the Conservative Party in December 2005, younger even than the youthful Tony Blair had been when he became Labour leader. Significantly, Cameron had far less experience of formative political battles within his party and beyond. As a result, he became a leader without quite knowing who he was as a public figure, or what he was for. His polished poise, demeanour and apparent sense of political purpose obscured his deep inexperience for a time. He rose too speedily and was neither ready nor ideologically suited to lead the UK after the many traumas of the 2008 financial crash.

  Early internal and external battles matter for aspirant leaders. They test recently elected politicians in many different ways. Are they resilient? Do they possess guile? What are their convictions and values? Can they express them effectively? Blair was Cameron’s model as a leader, but the Labour leader had been an MP for eleven years by the time he acquired the crown, and had been heavily involved in several intense internal debates over the future of Labour’s policy and strategy. Being a prominent participant in the battles over a party’s future is one way that aspirant leaders acquire some shape and definition.

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  The Mighty And The Almighty

  How Political Leaders Do God

  • Nick Spencer, Nick Spencer(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Biteback Publishing

    (Publisher)

  Cameron was born on 9 October 1966, the third of Ian and Mary Cameron’s four children. Ian Cameron, who had been born with severely deformed legs, was a stockbroker, and Mary a justice of the peace. The family lived in Kensington and Chelsea, in London, before moving to an old rectory near Newbury, in Berkshire, after which David was sent to an exclusive prep school and then on to Eton. He went on to study PPE (philosophy, politics and economics) at Oxford University, where he gained a first-class degree and joined the Bullingdon Club, an infamously rich, rowdy dining club for elite public schoolboys. He proceeded to a job in the Conservative Research Department where he worked with his future leadership competitor David Davis, met his future Chancellor George Osborne and helped brief Prime Minister John Major for the then still bi-weekly Prime Minister’s Questions. From politics Cameron moved sideways into PR, working as head of corporate communications for the ITV television company Carlton for seven years, before unsuccessfully contesting the seat of Stafford in the 1997 general election, and then winning Witney, in Oxfordshire, four years later.

  Cameron had thus only been in Parliament for four years before he contested the Conservative Party leadership, yet it was precisely this novelty that appealed to his audience. The legacy of Thatcherism, a painful post-Thatcher government marked by scandal and open warfare over Europe, and the force of political nature that was New Labour had left the Tory Party contaminated and seemingly unelectable. Cameron offered a new start. Indeed, in many ways he was the product of New Labour, in the same way as New Labour had been the product of Margaret Thatcher. A young, pragmatic, adaptable, liberal-minded, socially concerned Conservative, he was also father of a severely disabled son, Ivan, who required constant care, and whose needs scythed through the privilege in Cameron’s past. When he spoke of how the National Health Service was a lifesaver and what carers meant to people, Cameron knew whereof he spoke, in the process allaying voters’ fears about an NHS in Tory hands.

  This new, young Tory politician broke the mould of the recent past and won voters over, at least in part. In May 2010 he became the youngest British Prime Minister since 1812 and the first, since the Second World War, of a coalition government.

  SPIRITUAL BIOGRAPHY

  In the normal run of things, David Cameron would be a borderline candidate for inclusion in this volume. While clearly no atheist, Cameron’s Christian faith is, by his repeated admissions, somewhat vague.

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  Leadership and Uncertainty Management in Politics

  Leaders, Followers and Constraints in Western Democracies

  • François Vergniolle De Chantal, Agnès Alexandre-Collier, Agnès Alexandre-Collier(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Based on the EU referendum debate in Britain, from a call for a referendum on the Maastricht treaty in the 1990s to the current referendum debate on Britain’s EU membership, this chapter will look at how the whole EU debate exerts pressure on – and also explains – the temptation of populism for David Cameron. His new style of leadership has been widely discussed elsewhere (Denham and O’Hara, 2007; Evans, 2008; Bale, 2009; Heppell, 2013b; Heffernan, 2014). In this chapter, it should be understood both as a strategy for governmentality and a method of party management. On a governmental level, the referendum has become a major instrument of this new practice. Since the 1990s, the extensive use of direct democracy in such a representative government has produced a paradox which the current Prime Minister has not failed to exploit in the face of the mounting public divisions on European integration and the rise of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), thus changing the relation with his followers, i.e. party members and voters. As far as party organization goes, Cameron’s method of management also demonstrates a new style of leadership which takes more account of social environmental pressures, following Katz and Mair’s ‘cartel party’ thesis (1995, 1997). The organizational reforms introduced in 1998 have provided successive Conservative leaders with an opportunity to give party members more direct access to decision-making inside the party. After 2005, David Cameron, among others, capitalized on internal democratization and the widening of the electorate, a strategy which resulted paradoxically in strengthening his leadership of the party. Therefore, given Pierre Rosanvallon’s (2011) definition of populism mentioned in the introduction to this volume, David Cameron may be classified among ‘grassroots-connectors’ running the risk of lapsing into populism in his ambition to reconnect with the people at all costs.

  Populism as a communicative strategy

  The case of David Cameron’s new style of leadership has often been raised elsewhere. To most scholars, his style has been primarily considered as part of a communicative strategy to popularize his image and ‘detoxify’ the brand of his party (Alexandre-Collier, 2010; Bale, 2011). In this framework, even though a relationship is established between rhetoric and political strategy (Higgins, 2013: 58), populism remains essentially a rhetorical device. Cameron’s rhetoric, which was motivated by the ‘emergent political and social circumstances’ of the economic crisis (Higgins, 2013: 63), centred mainly on the message of the ‘Big Society’ which was particularly expedient as a means of displacing power from the elite to the people. Making the case for ‘a massive, radical redistribution of power’, Cameron argued that

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