Tonight:
-4°c
At a rather crusty event a few years ago, I fell into conversation with an elderly gent. Out of devilment, I asked him what it would take to make him Labour. “That would be a bit difficult,” he said, “because my son's a Conservative politician, so that rather colours it.”
It took a bit more probing to discover that he was Cameron père. He wasn't remotely boastful about it, just quietly proud. As an admirer came up to gush something about “your amazing son”, he murmured: “I quite liked Tony Blair, though.”
Quiet courtesy with a shard of wit is my memory of a brief encounter with Cameron senior. He had the good old-fashioned social grace of being able to talk to anyone, while remaining himself.
His physical frailty was well hidden. All I had known at the time was that he was a stockbroker and stalwart of White's club. David described this venue with masterful spin as “just somewhere I go with my dad”, though St James's is about as far from most dads' and sons' local as imaginable.
The Cameron family can be parodied for their pukka background. The PM's late father was absolutely of a type — think Newbury racecourse, an “old” City network, cut-glass vowels and a distant racy past in the SW3 area.
“A huge hero figure” was David's judgment on “the Dad” in acknowledgement of his cheery triumph over hardships — deformed legs since birth, multiple operations and, finally, amputation.
Political parentage is a potent thing, because those who want to lead need to show that they can connect with the past, as well as promise us a better future.
It is the reason both Milibands latch on to the memories of their Marxist father Ralph in the leadership campaign: David does so to show that for all his centrism, he has roots in the emotional side of the Left, Ed to borrow the mantle of radical thought and energy.
Gordon Brown's “moral compass” was inherited, as he often told us, from his Presbyterian father. Margaret Thatcher cited the values of Alderman Roberts, her grocer father, as the formative influence on her self-reliance.
After a return to Westminster over-shadowed by Coalition spats and dramas surrounding his press chief and Foreign Secretary, David Cameron finds himself once again the emotional centre of the Tory story.
In the space of a couple of years, he has lost a son and gained a new daughter, while moving from civilian to Prime Minister in the most extraordinary electoral circumstances since the war.
His father's comment wasn't far off a prediction: the Cameron mix of political journey and personal saga is reminiscent of the Blairs, but in a different time and with a very different cast and circumstances.
Of course, all hardship is grist to the politician's mill. It becomes part of their “story”, like the galvanising effect of Blair's mother and her early death. Yet Cameron's always visible affection shows an ease about his relationship with “the Dad” that is wholly sincere.
That crosses more social boundaries than any spin doctor could hope to traverse.
