Dave vs Boris: Battle of the Bullingdon boys

Sean O'Grady tells the story of one of Britain’s great political rivalries, and how Brexit brought it to an end. Cameron never thought he’d lose, Johnson never thought he’d win, and yet here we are...

Johnson is better at winning power; Cameron is better at exercising it (Getty/The Independent)

It is one of the great political rivalries of our time – high-octane, laced with intrigue, flavoured by insult, framed by mutual suspicion, defined by Brexit. As pressure on the prime minister builds, and a premature end to his political career looms, it is not too soon to wonder how he will stand in history. If he survives and wins another general election, then the 2020s will be his in the same way as the 1980s belonged to Margaret Thatcher, or the Edwardian era was owned by HH Asquith. If Johnson is out by the summer, he will always be able to claim he “got Brexit done”, whether or not it is true. He might end up as a sort of reverse Ted Heath: leader of a short-lived, unsuccessful government in turbulent times, which never lived up to its promise and was plagued by inflation and poor productivity, but always remembered for one big historic achievement. Heath took Britain into Europe; Johnson took us out.

For Johnson, though, one benchmark is how he stands, and will stand, by comparison with his great rival: not Sir Keir Starmer, or Jeremy Corbyn, but David Cameron.

Because they are, nominally at least, on the same side in politics, it’s sometimes easy to forget how intensely competitive the pair have been, and for how long. They are both, famously, products of Eton, Oxford, and the raucous and vulgar Bullingdon Club, where an initiation ceremony involved burning a £50 note in front of a homeless person. Their arrogance comes in different flavours, but they have more in common than they’d care to admit. They come from roughly the same echelon of society – posh and prosperous but by no stretch aristocratic (although Cameron went on to marry a daughter of the landed gentry). The pair are almost contemporaries (Cameron is younger, at 55 to Johnson’s 57), and Cameron made it into No 10 first, something Johnson could not let rest. Both were MPs by their thirties, elected to represent Witney and Henley respectively in 2001.