Cameron the History Man

Interesting long interview by Simon Schama with David Cameron (right) in the Financial Times (registration) today.

The first thing I ask him is to imagine Florence, 16 years hence, about to do her history GCSE (in the restored version of the curriculum I push him to reinstate), asking her pa what he’d done to deserve the plaudits. An unspoken but unmistakeable “blimey” ensues at the thought of Florence fast-forwarded so far beyond the nappy years. But his immediate response is telling: “I hope I will be able to say that I first of all established a coalition government, the first in 65 years. It was in the national interest to deal with the crisis in Britain’s totally overstretched public finances and deficit, and we took the country out of the danger zone.”

Coalitionism is something that Labour does not yet seem to understand, but it is interesting that (a) Cameron seemed to think during the election that a hung parliament was quite possible, and (b) he assumed that in that case he would form a minority government.

He fondly recalls the breathless fervour of Vernon Bogdanor, a constitutional historian and his old tutor at Oxford (a time he recalls as “the best three years of my life”). “He looked forward to a hung parliament. He had this vision that I would be on line one, the Queen would be on line two, the BBC on line three and he would basically be telling us all what to do. It didn’t quite work out like that. It all happened so quickly.” Given the state of the country (the spine-tingling word “Greece” then dominating the headlines), he thought “the right thing to do was to respond with a generous and big offer … Let’s try and shoot for a strong, stable, maximalist government.”

He gently disses the Tea-Party tendency on the US right:

I ask him what he thinks of American conservatism’s lurch to the libertarian extreme. “How shall I put this? We seem to have drifted apart … there is an element of American conservatism that is headed in a very culture-war direction, which is just different. There are differences with the American right.”

He has a postmodern moment of presumably ironic naivety:

It’s quite odd watching Spooks now, as it’s kind of not like it really is.

And I thought this was interesting, given the impossiblism of Ed Miliband’s declaration on Tuesday: “What does it say about the values of our society, what have we become, that a banker can earn in a day what the care worker earns in a year? It’s wrong, conference.” I would have thought the Tories might ask what he proposes to do about it and why such moral disapproval does not apply to footballers. But Cameron joins in:

The centre right “should never be frightened of standing up to big business”, he says. “We have tried to come down hard on excessive pay in the state sector. I think that there are pretty strong things to be said about pay in other parts of the economy. I don’t have a problem with doing that.”

Politicians are often strangely revealing when asked to sum up what they hope to achieve in a few words. Cameron is no exception. Schama thought the word that recurred most often was “children”. He asked how Cameron wanted to leave Britain at the end of his time in office.

A better place for children to go to school in, to grow up in.

James Forsyth sees this focus on children as a non-ideological goal being pursued by ideological means, namely pluralist schools reform. I don’t agree: I see it as a consensual goal being pursued by “what works”.

Photograph: Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin

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