THE INDEPENDENT: David Cameron has long been spoken of as a future prime minister. His biographer, James Hanning, charts his relentless rise
So he got there in the end. You don't have to be a swivel-eyed conspiracy theorist to think that David Cameron was bound to be Prime Minister one day. Of course, his intelligence and upbringing in greenest, most comfortable Berkshire meant he was better placed than most to get where he wanted. And his family history, with a line of Tory MPs on his mother's side stretching back generations, gave him an implicit Conservatism and a freedom to be pragmatic that his more doctrinaire contemporaries found enviable.
He impressed contemporaries when he arrived in the Conservative Research department in 1988. In researching our biography of him, Francis Elliott and I found the words that became almost a cliché among those who knew him then: "destined for great things".
But he is no accidental politician. He had to want it, and, boy, did he want it. It is possible to construct a theory – unproven, I'd say – that he decided in his early teens that he wanted to be Prime Minister. Friends recall the alarmingly self-confident young man sitting at the breakfast table, proudly announcing that one day he would lead the Conservative Party. At Eton, he was quite unintimidated by arriving at this vast and forbidding school.
He was confident to the verge of bumptiousness, contemporaries recall. He failed to get into Pop, the school's set of prefects, and the fear of failure to which he admits may stem from not clearing this hurdle. But contemporaries also remember him in his early years there as a good-natured and amusing boy who didn't stand out in any way. >>> James Hanning | Wednesday, May 12, 2010
