Johann Hari: The real Cameron is now coming into focus

After a year of free PR, the hazy clouds of green gas and pinkish vapour are dispersing and the real David Cameron is coming into view. This week, a superb, impeccably balanced biography by James Hanning and Francis Elliott and a more ranty Channel Four film by Peter Hitchens have acted as extractor fans, finally blowing away some of the smoke.

It is now clear that the David Cameron we have been sold is an ad man's hologram, created to send us the message that The Tories Have Changed. (Chant with us, now: The Tories Have Changed. The Tories Have...) Underneath the advertising, what's there?

The speed of Cameron's reinvention is an indicator of its inauthenticity. In 2005, he called wind farms "giant bird-blenders"; in 2006, he built one on to the side of his house. In 2005, he called for "a massive road-building programme" and was involved in slapping down Tim Yeo for speaking out on green issues; in 2006, he was pulled across the Arctic by huskies to inspect melting glaciers.

The list of Damascene transformations goes on: he damned Blair for "the promotion of homosexuality in schools" and backed Section 28, then started cheering gay marriage three years later. He called Thatcher "Mother", then announced, "There is such a thing as society." And on, and on. One genuine transformation is plausible - but dozens, in such a short time?

This extreme makeover is designed to disguise a product of extreme privilege who remains loyal to his aristo-tribe. Cameron has claimed he had "a normal childhood" and "a normal university experience", but the facts are rather different. He was born to a millionaire stockbroker and a debutante, with a bloodline that connects him to Elizabeth Windsor. As a child he had a swimming pool, a tennis court and nannies.

His biographers note that at his prep school, the 80 other parents included "eight honourables, four sirs, two captains, two doctors, two majors, two princesses, two marchionesses, one viscount, one brigadier, one commodore, one earl, one lord, and one queen (the Queen)."

This childhood is captured in one neat image: an 11-year-old David Cameron on a plane, raising a glass of Dom Perignon '69 to an Eton schoolmaster and braying, "Good health, Sir!"

Of course, it is as foolish to dismiss a person because he comes from a landed estate as it is to dismiss somebody from a council estate. Franklin Roosevelt was a child of riches but went on to be the greatest left-wing President in US history.

The problem isn't with Cameron's background per se; it is that he has not at any point in his life imaginatively seen beyond it. He has denied he is rich because he doesn't "own a private jet". He describes the richest 6 per cent of Brits who have to pay inheritance tax as "ordinary tax-payers". It's not surprising Cameron has this view: his first flatmate, Pete Czernin, was the heir to a £1.5bn (that's billion) fortune. This is the world he knows.

This blinding wealth informs and malforms Cameron's policies. Look at, say, Educational Maintenance Allowances (EMA), introduced by Gordon Brown. If you are between 16 and 19 and your parents earn less than £25,000 a year, the Government now gives you £40 a week to stay on at school. It makes the difference for tens of thousands of poor kids between getting an education and not, and it's had a fantastic impact on staying-on rates - but Cameron's Old Etonian-stuffed frontbench has dismissed EMAs as "a bribe".

Or look at other pro-poor policies the Cameroons cannot understand and would wipe out. The European Social Chapter gives part-time workers - who are often on the minimum wage - the right to parental leave, regular holidays and other basic protections. Cameron says it is one of his "top priorities" to pull out.

Cameron claims he wants to enhance social mobility and the chances of poor kids getting on - but he benefited from precisely the nepotistic networks that prevent this from happening. He got his first job as an intern by calling his godfather, a Tory MP. He got his first job in business because Daddy was the CEO's stockbroker. He got his first paid job because an uncle - the Queen's equerry - called up and demanded to know why he'd been turned down. He surrounds himself with the products of these networks now, in his own office.

His biographers note of the super-rich, "This is Cameron's tribe, and it is clear he feels its call." You can see this in the areas where he is hinting he would like to see tax cuts. When Shadow Chancellor George Osborne (heir to a baronetcy and a wallpaper fortune, in case you hadn't guessed) talks about the need for "flatter taxes", this is not-so-subtle code.

The people who created the idea of flat taxes - academics Robert Hall and Alvin Rabushka - explain, "It is an obvious mathematical law that [flatter] taxes on the successful will have to be made up for by higher taxes on average people."

Cameron's pledge to reintroduce the Married Couple's Tax Allowance and his aspiration to cut inheritance tax are screechy renditions of the same tune. They would mark a huge shift of cash to the rich from the poor and the middle.

At a time when the biggest issue facing Britain domestically is worsening inequality, do we want to put somebody from the richest 0.01 per cent - with no understanding of ordinary life - in charge? Being Prime Minister exposes you to a thousand needling pressures; any shallow rhetorical commitments quickly get burnt away and your gut instincts - who you are, what you believe - become primary. This suggests Cameron's Tory core will come to the fore. Alice Thompson - a friend of his - said in one of the first profiles of Cameron's set, "There is no question of real spiritual commitment; they are impelled by an attraction to power."

She's right: he is saying what he must to decontaminate the Tory brand. His core instincts and his life experiences, however, draw him to the hard-right. The journalist Anne McElvoy remembers Cameron not so long ago at a dinner in honour of John Redwood "flushed with excitement, shirt hanging out and waving a large cigar while talking very tough about free markets". Even now, after Redwood has obscenely suggested that drastically destabilising the planet's climate will be a good thing, he is still in charge of Cameron's competitiveness policies.

The Tebbitite right-wingers who are fretting about Cameron being insufficiently conservative should chill out; it's the rest of us who should be worried.

If we do not want to be ruled by a Brideshead Regurgitated clique, we need to get to work now to ensure Cameron's rising star ends up as merely a shooting star. Then he can return to his true vocation - as a shooting-hunting-and-fishing star.

j.hari@independent.co.uk

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