Cameron’s life of gloss shows he’s too shallow to lead

By Dan Whittle / @DanWhittle

Today at the Conservative Spring Conference, David Cameron has again called for a television debate with Gordon Brown. It’s one of his only consistent policies in recent years and it reinforces the view that he is more interested in getting on TV than getting on with issues that matter.

Cameron has lead a life of spin. He learned his trade at the Tory Research Department, during which it is revealed today (in the Independent) he took a trip to South Africa funded by a company which lobbied against sanctions on the apartheid regime.

Then he moved on to corporate PR. In the Francis Elliott and James Hanning book Cameron: the Rise of the New Conservative it was noted Cameron’s seven years in the PR industry for Carlton included “obstruction, bullying and on one occasion at least, downright misleading”. A Carlton Colleague said there was “no evidence of any interest in the sort of new age stuff on show today”.

In Cameron on Cameron, by Dylan Jones, the Conservative leader says his experience taught him “that spin and PR will not get you where you want to go, and that the truth is the most important commodity.”

But the truth has never been the most important thing to Dave.

Cameron had to apologise in February after one of his staff changed the Wikipedia entry for Titian to try to win a bizarre argument with Gordon Brown over the artist’s age.

The stories about how Cameron invited the media to his holiday in Cornwall last summer, but not to his real holiday on a yacht on the Turkish Riviera, showed that he is desperate to hide his wealth.

One of the perceptions that he cannot shake, according to Tory internal polls, is that he will always back the rich.

In Dylan Jones’ book, Cameron boasts about his years in PR: “Basically I got to know the City”, “I was the front man in terms of talking to brokers and understanding the markets”, “I spent a lot of time with other media companies, but much more time with highly paid analysts at Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch.”

He is for the moment, understandably, trying to distance himself from his past associations with bankers.

An understanding of the importance of presentation has been essential to a man who needed to change the poor public perception of his party. But though PR is his strength it is also his weakness. Britain will not choose an ex-PR man for PM.

The 1970 film The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer was a scarily accurate comic observation of changing times in politics, times when media profile was becoming more important.

It starts with a man marching into the offices of a PR agency one morning, clad in a smart suit and carrying a clipboard under his arm – so brash and confident that no-one dare question his right to be there – and he proceeds to use the company as the first rung on his ladder to hasty success. Within months, the man rises through the ranks and soon moves into politics, gaining momentum by the relentless use of opinion polls to craft a popular image. Within a few years he has become Prime Minister, and his whirlwind rise to power has left all enemies reeling in the backwash of his charisma.

It sounds like David Cameron’s game plan, something written on the back of a napkin in late 80s Notting Hill.

Audiences then laughed at the idea that a PR man could ever go on to be leader of a political party. That was the joke at the centre of the film. Well, now the film should be required watching.

What can give us hope is that Cameron’s record helps us see through the spin.