In search of Dave Cameron

In seven months, the Tory leader could be PM. What does his background tell us about how he would run Britain? His co-biographer, James Hanning, hunts for answers

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Only five years ago, it was the accepted wisdom that there would never be another Etonian leader of the Tory party. We had all decided that that old-world privilege is too much of a turn-off in hip, multicultural, "classless", social democratic Britain.

Yet here is David Cameron, son of as much privilege as money can buy, not only party leader but apparently on the brink of Downing Street.

What talents he must have to overcome such prejudice, if that is the word. And indeed he is prodigiously talented. Quite apart from his comfortable and exceptionally stable family upbringing, David Cameron is politically blessed with remarkable gifts of fluency, intelligence, charm, decency, emotional intelligence, preternatural self-confidence and a nose for knowing the right thing to say. He was lucky, too, in becoming Tory leader when he was young enough to represent change, but – unlike, say, William Hague – at a time when the party felt in desperate need of that change (or at least said it did). He has been given the time he needed.

Not that the job fell into his lap. He had to work hard for it, and there were times during his leadership challenge four years ago when his supporters could have met in a Mini. At one point aides didn't have the heart to tell him how badly it was going. So there is a resilience, a toughness born of the sort of ambition that, traditionally at least, might be thought to be letting down the code of effortless superiority. He really wants the job and, albeit in a charmingly self-disparaging way, he is not worried who knows it. (To that extent, certainly, he is a moderniser.)

The question is why he wants the job. What are the great wrongs he wants righted? He would splutter indignantly at the question. What have I been working for for four years, if people don't understand what I want to do to public services, Europe and so on? But people still do ask the question, and according to an IoS poll on the subject today, nearly half of respondents remain in the dark.

Early in his leadership, during an off-the-record lunch with senior staff from a newspaper (not this one), he was asked the "what's it all about?" question. There was some embarrassment (although only by Cameronian standards of fluency). He muttered something about Conservative values and everyone looked at their soup. There was room for improvement, clearly, if only in presentation. But even after his "this is me", no-script speech at Blackpool in 2007; even after countless interviews and soundbites; even after last Friday's love-in with his new best friend The Sun – the sense remains, to the mounting frustration of his staff, that we don't really know him.

It is a mistake to look, as many do, for too much fire in the belly of David Cameron. That is not to say that he doesn't get cross, or that he is indifferent to injustice, at least when confronted by it. But Tories are often Tories by disposition as much as by opinion, and the upbringing that created that disposition – well, who wouldn't feel they wanted to conserve it? His home life was low-key, safe and rural, and involved blameless, or at least carefree, rural gambolling with his three siblings.

His parents gave them all a loving, correct and happy time, with a sense of manners, church and public service never far away. Mary Cameron used to be a JP, as had been her mother and grandmother, while the men on her side of the family veered towards Tory politics. His father, Ian, an Express-reading stockbroker and bastion of White's Club, commuted into London from Berkshire every day, making ludicrously light of severely deformed legs. "[Dad] is my role model," he said later. "He has never let his disability hold him back. He has proved you can do anything you want in life." So when, in the mid-1970s, Ian Cameron complained about the "reds" in the government, unions "running the country", and an inflation rate that touched 28 per cent, 10-year-old David would doubtless have taken it all on board.

The confidence commonly ascribed to Eton seems to pre-date his attendance at the school. He was always an exceptionally assured little boy, ready with an opinion to the verge of bumptiousness. Eton, though, would have built on such assurance, even if he was not notably successful there at first. As the psychologist Oliver James puts it, "Etonians have a fundamentally optimistic view of life. If the sun shines on you for much of your early life you tend to think it has been put there for that express purpose."

His drive towards politics has clouded beginnings. He used to tell the parents of his teenage friends that he would lead the Tory party one day, most would laugh indulgently. Friends protest now that this was more fanci-ful than real. Yet, after he started A-levels – when he first studied politics – he performed a remarkable academic surge, winning awards as he flew into Oxford, where he won a first. It was during his late teens and early twenties that the nation's big political decisions were being made, and Cameron will tell you that he opted for Nato, against the closed shop, for privatisation, and against unilateralism, almost as if his background had nothing to do with it. Those who know him well, though, will tell you he would never be other than a Tory.

While he enjoyed intellectual debate, the uncomfortable, subversive gene never found much of a home in the boy Dave. He liked where he had come from too much. According to Charles Moore, biographer of Margaret Thatcher: "His vision of Britain is one based on his home and his constituency. It is born of affection, and a sense of obligation. It is as if he is saying, I am grateful for my good luck and I know how good life in this country can be: why can't we make it better for everyone." This interpretation endorses the simplicity of motivation to which Cameron has often laid claim. Those of a more radical cast of mind will say it highlights just how out of touch he is. What does a dreamy upbringing in Berkshire have to do with inner-city poverty, unemployment and crime?

At Oxford Cameron enjoyed baiting humourless left-wingers, and his membership of the notorious Bullingdon Club, at the height of Thatcherism, would win him few votes now. Yet, although he held a party on the night of the third Thatcher election victory in 1987, he barely bothered with student politics. He knew he could do it, and felt no need to prove himself. He wasn't a pushy political hack, but he wasn't a cardboard, public-school cut-out either. A foreign-born former girlfriend remembers the stultifying Home Counties party scene: "He managed to be always comfortable in it but his life had more content. He would read more, think more. He wasn't one of that bland lot."

Those who see him as a Thatcherite in disguise should remember his patrician, left-leaning godfather Tim Rathbone, a Tory MP with strong – dare one say progressive? – views on drugs, apartheid, nursery education and local democracy, with whom Cameron worked during breaks from university. It is from this section of the party that he regards himself as having come. On his mother's side, the term "one-nation Conservative" might have been coined to refer to some of the Mount family. Friends will tell you how he mocks ideologues, hates doctrine for its own sake and is mistrustful of -ologies and -isms. He recently told an audience of friends "it's people more than ideas that matter in politics". Not that ideas don't interest him. Detractors say he is a jumped-up PR man, in that respect he is a victim of his own smoothness – and an over-excitable media. Over the dinner-table, he'd be far more likely to be discussing class sizes than Class As.

But while in PR, working for Carlton Television, he made himself unpopular with a number of journalists who saw him as arrogant and untrustworthy. He struggles to explain this perception, but it is fair to say he was perhaps trying too hard to impress, to the detriment of those outside his boss Michael Green's charmed circle.

For all the talk of the Killers and Arctic Monkeys, Cameron is essentially stodgily conventional. But from his wife Samantha comes a more bohemian, racy and less strait-laced approach. It was she, more than anyone, who turned him away from support for Clause 28 and toward a variety of social equalities, a position now seen as the norm in the Tory party. Was this a weaselly compromise to fit in with the way the social wind was blowing, or a considered change of opinion? You pays your money.... Cameron would see no shame in bowing to the prevailing majority. Politics is about winning. It is more interesting to ask on what issues he has risked unpopularity on what might be called a point of principle. There are not many (although he would probably cite the environment, on which he has good reason to claim he changed the political weather), and he has never come close to resigning on such a matter.

In his office hangs a picture of the former PM Harold Macmillan, with whom Cameron, one suspects, would welcome comparison. To some, Macmillan was the arch grouse-moor wheeler-dealer, expert at picking his way through Westminster mantraps with distrait charm and base cunning, arguably in the service of a greater good. But he was also a pragmatist, a believer in the art of the possible. Why tie yourself up with ideology? It is what works that matters. Cynics say that sort of governing is mere presiding, simply the management of power. Cameron will know that administration of high office requires more than a "cat that got the cream" expression.

Another believer in "what works" is Tony Blair. Until Iraq, lest we forget, Blair was popular, a model of moderation and centrist interest-balancing. No wonder that David Cameron admires and copies him so much. (When feeling his way in one tricky policy area, he has been heard to ask: "What does Tony Blair think of this?") It was only very late in Blair's rule that we came to find his "pretty straight sort of guy" remark to be so hollow. And Cameron thinks being "a pretty straight sort of guy" is pretty important (which is why he initially blocked Boris Johnson as candidate for London Mayor). Politics is about personality and judgement. We are being asked to buy the man and his capacity for making tricky decisions.

Cameron, for all the polish, is a political nerd. He is fascinated by the business of politics, how it is done, why people rise, why they fall. Like Blair, Cameron has a big tent of many voices. A certain guileful lack of clarity can be an advantage. It helps sustain interest, so you only tell people things in dribs and drabs. Sometimes, as with the Lisbon debate, a little obscurity can keep the show on the road until a solution presents itself. But play that game too long and you look evasive. The NHS, we are told, is safe, as is the foreign aid budget. But does he support Trident as it currently exists? Would he oppose electoral reform with the last breath in his body? How will he increase tax? Will he raise taxes on flying? Will he cut or means-test child benefit? Will he make the BBC charge for its website? With up to eight months to go until the election? Now that would be telling.

Cameron: The Rise of the New Conservative by Francis Elliott and James Hanning is published by HarperPerennial