Even at a place like Eaton, it didn't seem likely that anyone in my year would actually become

Prime Minister. At school, everyone is ambitious, everyone loudly stretching upwards, but perhaps

true ambition has a pair of silent claws. None of us identified David Cameron as the boy

marching inexorably towards Downing Street.

When he became Tory leader in 2005, I had difficulty recalling him.

Wasn't he that affable, sweet-faced, minor fellow at the edge of things?

I remembered him as quite handsome with the Etonian's uncanny ability to soften entitlement with charm.

Mostly, he was defined by negatives.

He wasn't an intellectual or scholar, a rebel, a musician, a school journalist or writer, even a sportsman.

He wasn't obviously political.

He belonged to a social crowd that didn't intersect much with mine.

Home counties, landed gentry, a stockbroker father somehow involved the customary, expensive vagueness in finance, a grand house I could only imagine,

and probably in those days envied. These boys all knew one another from somewhere else,

fraternized masonically in the holidays,

"'took one another's sisters to parties in Sussex

"'and to hunt balls in Gloucestershire,

"'and dressed like their fathers,

"'in clothes that looked inherited,

"'even when purchased just the other day at New and Lingwood.

"'My own background was different.

"'In my last year at the school, "'I wrote an anti-Thatcher Screed in the school magazine,

"'and a journalist from the son ambushed me in the street.

...