Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton: David Cameron’s new title recalls chummy Tory set
Britain’s prime minister-turned-foreign secretary has
a posh new moniker.
BY ANDREW
MCDONALD AND DAN BLOOM
NOVEMBER
17, 2023 12:36 PM CET
https://www.politico.eu/article/lord-david-cameron-of-chipping-norton-new-title-tory-set/
LONDON —
Britain’s comeback kid foreign secretary will be known as Lord Cameron of
Chipping Norton — in an inadvertent callback to a chummy group of elite
power-players from his time in Downing Street.
A House of
Lords spokesperson confirmed that David Cameron will take on the new title on
Monday, when he will be introduced to Britain’s second legislative chamber. In
a shock return, the ex-prime minister was appointed foreign secretary by
current-PM Rishi Sunak earlier this week.
Cameron was
famously described by Britain’s media corps as a member of the “Chipping Norton
Set” in the 2010s — a group of media, political and celebrity elites all
hailing from the market town of Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire.
Along with
Cameron and his entrepreneur wife Samantha, the group included Rebekah Brooks,
the head of Rupert Murdoch’s News U.K. operation, the broadcaster Jeremy
Clarkson and Blur bassist Alex James. Brooks was known to be close to Cameron —
and the pair exchanged cosy texts in the lead up to the 2010 election that saw
Cameron enter Downing Street.
Cameron
left the House of Commons in 2016 following his Brexit-induced resignation as
prime minister. That meant he had to become an unelected peer in the House of
Lords in order to serve as foreign secretary.
Wearing the
traditional red, ermine, robes, Cameron will be introduced to the second
chamber and take the oath Monday afternoon.
He will
then for the first time take questions from fellow peers on his new foreign
affairs brief.
‘Unfinished business’: the cosy world of Lord
Cameron of Chipping Norton
The new foreign secretary, snug in his coterie of
‘louche, power-hungry and amoral’ friends, is keen to be remembered for
something other than Brexit
Daniel
Boffey
Daniel
Boffey Chief reporter
Sat 18 Nov
2023 06.00 GMT
Wearing a
polo shirt, ear defenders, a Peaky Blinders-style hat and black wellington
boots, David Cameron was driving Jeremy Clarkson’s tractor this time last year
on a sunny Saturday morning when it exploded. “There was a bang and a
Ukraine-sized mushroom cloud,” wrote Clarkson, who lives in a village
neighbouring the hamlet of Dean in Oxfordshire where the former prime minister
has a £1.5m home. “Oil splattered into all the blackberry bushes and bits of
iron were to be heard landing several minutes later,” Clarkson said of his
“mate’s” accident on his drive. Cameron had borrowed the red 1961 Massey
Ferguson to mow his paddock, the broadcaster explained in a Sunday Times
column. “He claims of course that he didn’t do anything wrong.”
Lord
Cameron of Chipping Norton, as he will be introduced in the House of Lords on
Monday in order to allow him to serve in Rishi Sunak’s cabinet as foreign
secretary, is no stranger to making such pink-cheeked denials of blame. There
was the holding and losing of the Brexit referendum, the accusations of
familiar relations with a pig’s head in his Oxford days and more recently the
pocketing of $1m (£800,000) a year for his lobbying of ministers on behalf of
the distressed finance company Greensill Capital. “I am riding to the rescue
with supply chain finance with my new friend Lex Greensill,” texted Cameron in
one of 12 messages to the then permanent secretary to the Treasury Sir Tom
Scholar on 6 March 2020, when the financial markets were in freefall at the
start of the Covid pandemic.
Through all
of it, Cameron has retained a coterie of rather closer, albeit not always less
controversial, friends than Greensill. Indeed, while global politics may have
completely changed in the seven years since he left Downing Street, Cameron’s
cosy social world has remained familiar. The groups can be loosely defined as
those of the west London Notting Hill (twinned with Westminster) set, where the
couple have a £4m home, and then, of course, the glamorous community around the
town of Chipping Norton, near where Cameron and his wife bought a cottage in
2001, and the name of which the new peer of the realm has adopted in his title.
The London
scene naturally includes his former chancellor, George Osborne, with whom he
remains in constant contact, along with “some of the old team”, as one friend
described them, such as the ex-Tory party chair Lord Feldman, the former
communications director Craig Oliver and Cameron’s deputy chief of staff in
Downing Street, Kate Fall. Fellow former Tory leader William Hague remains a
close confidante. He is thought to have been in on the recent surprise
appointment.
Then there
are the journalists to whom he is more than a contact, including Daniel
Finkelstein and Alice Thomson of the Times along with her husband Edward
Heathcoat Amory, as well as Robert Hardman of the Daily Mail who attended the
Camerons’ wedding in 1996.
He
regularly speaks to Lord Vaizey of Didcot, formerly Ed Vaizey the MP for
Wantage, and lunched in recent days with the former energy minister Greg Barker
and the current development minister, Andrew Mitchell, two members of a
Cameroon supporters club.
It once
also included the former MP for East Devon, Hugo Swire, up to the point that
his wife, Sasha, revealed all about the inner workings of Cameron’s
“mateocracy” in her memoirs, Diary of an MP’s Wife. “Dave” stayed up late to
watch the film Atonement, with the aim of “admiring” Keira Knightley’s nipples,
Sasha reported of one of the couple’s visits to see the Camerons at Chequers.
“As for his own personal game plan, he tells us seven years,” she wrote in her
diary in 2010, “then a return to the back benches, some outside interests, and
then leave altogether but also adds he would quite like to be foreign secretary
one day.”
It is,
however, the Chipping Norton set, of which Clarkson is a member, that is the
most intriguing aspect of Cameron’s world to many, perhaps tantalised by the
stories of cheese parties on the estate of the former Blur bassist Alex James
and jolly pilgrimages to the Cornbury music festival, known as Poshstock, at
Tew Park. Both Clarkson’s anecdote and sources in regular contact with the
former prime minister today suggest that this set remains one of Cameron’s
touchstones despite all the outside pressures upon it. “An incestuous
collection of louche, affluent, power-hungry and amoral Londoners located in
and around the prime minister’s Oxfordshire constituency,” was how the
columnist Peter Oborne described them in 2011.
Lord
Justice Leveson’s inquiry into media ethics the following year fleshed out the
nature of the set when a cache of text and email exchanges between Cameron and
Rebekah Brooks, at a time when she was head of Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper group
in the UK, as she is today. Brooks and her husband, Charlie, who went to Eton
with Cameron, live a mile from the former PM’s home in Dean, three miles
south-east of Chipping Norton. Thanking Brooks for letting him ride one of her
horses, Cameron had texted that the animal was “fast, unpredictable and hard to
control but fun”. Brooks reminisced to the Leveson inquiry that Cameron signed
some of his missives to her “LOL” – until she told him it meant “laugh out
loud” not “lots of love”.
Charlie
Brooks, a racehorse trainer, later admitted to having been disappointed with
the way Cameron had suggested his wife should resign at the height of the
phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World. Charlie Brooks was subsequently
cleared of charges of perverting the court of justice. But the door was left
open to a renewed friendship. He told LBC radio: “When this is all over, I’m
sure he’ll explain; ‘I’m sorry but I was … these are the pressures I was under
on that particular day.’ He also has pressures in this whole thing as well. So
I don’t feel any anger towards him at all.” Asked if they could be friends
again, he had replied: “Yeah, I do, yeah.”
It took a
while for relations to normalise and the set is arguably not what it was since
the divorce of Rupert Murdoch’s daughter, Elisabeth, from the PR guru Matthew
Freud. They had lived and regularly entertained at their sprawling country
house in nearby Burford. But the Brooks are firmly back in Cameron’s world,
sources say. “He does still see Charlie and Rebekah, there are drinks,” said a
friend. Charlie Brooks was very close to Cameron’s older brother, Alex, who
died in March this year aged 59 from pancreatic cancer. There has been further
bonding in their shared grief.
Sources
concede it may indeed be the case that there has been more contact with those
around Chipping Norton in recent years due to Cameron’s rather light diary
commitments. Immediately after leaving Downing Street, the position of the head
of Nato had been floated “but it would have meant living in Brussels and
Samantha was building up her business”, said a source. “The optics of commuting
from London would have been awful so that came to nothing.”
Cameron
told friends that he would instead spend the first two years out of Downing
Street on the “speaking circuit” to avoid conflicts of interest. That took him
around the world, as did being asked to lead a billion-dollar investment
initiative agreed between the UK and China. But it left Samantha at home with
their three children to fleetingly worry that they were not “getting on very
well”, she told the Happy Mum, Happy Baby podcast in 2020. Then Covid, the
embarrassing collapse of Greensill Capital and the change in relations between
the UK and China put paid to Cameron’s global adventures. Samantha would go on
to speak of her husband’s excellent cooking skills and dedication to serving up
a family meal every night for her and Nancy, 19, Elwyn, 17, and 13-year-old
Florence.
Sky News’s
Kay Burley had commented on Monday about Cameron’s growing waistline when he
astonished many by turning up at Downing Street but he has taken up playing
more tennis with Feldman, a source said, runs a lot (something he had only
taken up after becoming Tory leader in 2005) and is back shooting once in a
while at the Salperton estate in Gloucestershire, a pastime he shed when he
started leading the Conservatives.
After
securing a reported £800,000 advance, he wrote his memoirs in £25,000 shepherd
huts in the gardens of their homes in Dean and Trebetherick in Cornwall and is
president of Alzheimer’s Research UK while Samantha has been establishing her
fashion brand, Cefinn.
For three
weeks in January this year Cameron lectured students at the New York University
in Abu Dhabi on politics in the age of disruption. His company, the Office of
David Cameron, became an unlimited company several years ago and no longer has
to file company accounts but it is understood that he has been looking to move
into “geopolitical consultancy”.
Friends admit, however, that they could not immediately recall much of late that has been taking up the 57-year-old’s time beyond golf, tennis and taking his youngest daughter riding. He had been a “bit bored” and “public service genuinely means something to him”, said one. The hope of forging a new legacy, distinct from the Brexit disaster, is a driving force, friends say. “He was only 49 when he stopped being prime minister and I think having been elected for a five-year term with lots of ideas and then blowing it 12 months in by your own hand was very frustrating for him,” said another who spoke to Cameron recently. “I think it is a case of unfinished busin
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