Cameron’s choice of friends in his Oxfordshire idyll has never been particularly wise

Max Hastings writes scathingly of David Cameron in The Times today. It is an insightful and revealing piece.

Something, apart from schooling and a profound sense of entitlement, that Cameron shares with Boris Johnson is ignorance of the real world or even a working knowledge of it. There’s not much anyone can do about advantageous birth and the privileges that result from it. At the time that is. Eton and Oxford doth not a rounded person make. But after you come down from the dreaming spires the choice is yours. There’s a world out there to see and learn from, if you could be bothered. Dave wasn’t.

Cameron has never had a proper job in his life. In the pursuit of his political ambitions he held a number of sinecure jobs that family and connections found for him. But none exposed him to the world the vast majority of us live in. Harold Macmillan learned about “ordinary” people in the trenches. He never forgot this learning. Even Churchill, much posher even than Dave, rubbed shoulders with the hoi polloi from time to time. Cameron was and is uncomfortable outside his class milieu.

Cam and Sam glided effortlessly through life all the way to Number 10. The loss of a child seemed to give them a humanity and knowledge of the National Health Service. Cameron spoke movingly of their experience. But he didn’t build on it and in office his austerity programme damaged the Service he’d so recently praised. A charge of hypocrisy is not unfair.

We are looking at elitism here. The presumption that power, position and wealth gives you not just advantages but the right to them – to the Manor born. How ludicrously insensitive were those photographs when he bought his Shepherd’s Hut for £25,000 ? They can be show-offs all their lives these Bullingdon boys.

What Cameron allegedly did to feather his nest with his upwardly mobile Aussie mucker came from his inherited and refined sense of entitlement – and his associated disconnect from Right and Wrong . (See also fellow Buller Boris – the parallel is close). His choice of friends in his Oxfordshire idyll has never been particularly thoughtful or wise – but this takes “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” to a new level.