Face of Tories' new deal

IT'S rural Tory England, where every stone wall is a masterpiece.

On a glorious Saturday afternoon, a more honey-on-toast Cotswolds idyll would be hard to conjure. David Cameron lives here in west Oxfordshire in a perfect cottage, when he is not in his rented London house or his eco-palace, also in Kensington - a Victorian semi with solar panels and a rainwater harvester - or his country house in Devon, which he doesn't get to much these days.

Britain's Opposition Leader is feeding his eldest son, who is five, as I sit at the kitchen table. In other politicians this might be the ultimate presentational flourish - and Cameron is nothing if not a slick PR operator - the devoted father manfully wielding spaghetti hoops.

But it is not that. Ivan Cameron, a beautiful child with raven-dark hair and faraway eyes, is profoundly disabled, with cerebral palsy and epilepsy. He doesn't walk or talk or smile. He is lying across his father's lap exposing a hole in his abdomen through which a tube is delivering, first, drugs, and second liquid food. "When children visit and won't eat their tea, I tell them I'm going to put one of these in their tummy," Cameron says, smiling.

The disability of David and Samantha Cameron's first child is the only sadness in an otherwise enviable life, yet Ivan casts no shadow over it. On a walk this afternoon, Cameron wrestled Ivan's buggy through muddy fields to visit the pigs and lambs on a nearby farm, carrying him when the terrain got too heavy. He then picked up a lamb for him to touch. "Can you feel the lambkin, Ivan?" he asked gently.

Thankfully, we don't vote for politicians on the basis of how sweetly they minister to sick children, but when I have forgotten every word Cameron said to me, and long after the next election is won or lost, that tenderness will remain.

The first time I met him in London, 36-year-old Samantha was away, the boiler had broken, one-year-old son Elwen was pushing organic porridge up his nose and three-year-old Nancy was insisting on going swimming. ("Never give them choice," muttered the practised father. "They always choose the last thing they did," which must be just as true of his own back benches.)

At the park he spent all his time wiping down filthy swings with sodden tissues for "my little Nance". It was hardly Brideshead Revisited, as his critics like to claim.

Reared in rural west Berkshire, Cameron is smoothly urbane. Nothing much ruffles his cool; there is an upper-class mock-jadedness in which arduous or tedious things are pronounced boring. He displays none of former prime minister John Major's peevishness or the formality of Cameron's predecessor Michael Howard, which makes him easy company, fun to work for, pleasant to interview. The hope is that his lightness of touch will play well against what his team assumes (so far wrongly) will be "Granite Gordon" Brown's unpopularity as Prime Minister, but what fires him up?

I see him being praised by Al Gore as a champion of the planet and am amused to discover he started riding the famous bike only because his friend, shadow chancellor George Osborne, did and couldn't give Cameron a lift home from the Commons any more. I see him admired in Brussels as a dynamic leader with little interest in the architecture of treaties and constitutions when his Euro-sceptic colleagues (who think of little else) swear he's one of them. I see him present himself as a hero of the dispossessed, fretting with a pained expression about the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots, when not so long ago he campaigned against the minimum wage.

Cameron's big idea is social responsibility, the words that beam out from behind him on the screen as he gives his speeches. It sounds highly Blairite - same old rights v responsibilities rhetoric - but he insists it is no such thing. "(Tony) Blair's response to a problem (was) a summit in Downing Street, a new law," he says. "He has created 3000 new criminal offences. Mine is to ask what the family can do, what the voluntary sector can do, what the community can do."

He is enamoured of the voluntary sector. In some ways this is an extension of the old Conservative charitable instinct, the noblesse oblige on which Cameron was reared.

His mother, Mary, a magistrate for 40 years, was also involved in the learning disability charity Mencap and the Newbury Spring Festival, and the family ethos revolved around recognition of their own good fortune.

"I don't want it to sound like welfare on the cheap," he says of the community projects he wants to extend.

"It's about trusting people on the ground. Lots of falling-apart families aren't getting the attention because the social workers are dealing with the serious abuse cases. Is the answer to give more money to social services or to boost Kids Company (a south London charity run by Camilla Batmanghelidjh)?"

A Home Counties Tory agent (party organiser) confides that the constituency tea-makers think he's a communist but are keeping their "traps shut" as long as the poll ratings keep climbing. (They've since reversed a little but there's no expectation of a revolt.)

Maybe someone should remind them that Blair was twice as far ahead in the polls at this point in his leadership of British Labour, with the propeller of Tory sleaze behind him. But Cameron is working it; selling himself hard, as blatant as a busker with rent to pay. At youth programs for dropout kids in Bradford, in his Witney constituency, and in west London, he tells them all he's on their side. At the Spear youth project in Hammersmith, there is one-to-one coaching for the youths who would otherwise be, in the words of one helper, "vandalising your car". It runs on just pound stg. 150,000 ($351,000) a year, it is effective and Cameron would like to roll out its ethic across the nation to replace what he calls Brown's failing New Deal for youth.

Cameron will tell you the Conservative party has changed, but since he arrived only about 20 months ago, how can it possibly have had time? Despite this month's reshuffle, the shadow cabinet boasts some of the same old faces, elected on Howard's manifesto and his notorious campaign "Are You Thinking What We're Thinking?". There is David Davis (warm on capital punishment), with William Hague as shadow foreign secretary who, as leader, talked of England being "a foreign land" to its own citizens. The exiled lefties and Liberal Democrats may flirt with Cameron, but can they seriously stomach all of his chosen few?

The idea that Davis could have become the leader is salutary, for the new, nice Tory party seems to have been a mere option rather than a historical inevitability, the result of a leadership vote rather than years of soul-searching and argument. The last old-left candidate to make a serious challenge for Labour's leadership was 20 years ago. Cameron's old guard, by contrast, is at his elbow, probably living in silent hope that, once he has charmed the electorate, it can (Cameron included) get back to the serious business of slashing taxes that is buried in its DNA.

Meanwhile, inconveniently for Cameron, there is no big symbol to attack, no Clause 4 (Labour's nationalisation platform) to dismantle, thereby dramatising his hard-won progress; instead, he gives the traditionalists small heart attacks with headlines about hugging youths wearing hoodies.

His only evidence of real change is his A-list, the priority candidates put forward for winnable seats. Since its introduction last year, more than one-third of available seats have gone to women. He will tell you to look at Priti Patel in Essex, candidate for the safe seat of Witham, tipped to be the first Asian woman in parliament, or new MPs such as Grant Shapps and Mike Penning, who both arrived from a background of campaigning on the health service. He talks about the furious junior doctors whose rally he addressed, who have "crossed a threshold with this Government. People in the public sector are now prepared to listen to the Conservative Party". He believes that transforming the Tories is nowhere near as monumental a task as creating new Labour.

"Their core beliefs and values had to go: unions, nationalisation," he says. "We have had to catch up with modern Britain, change priorities, do more on public services, less on the European issue, but never ditch what we stand for." The Tories' last convincing victory was the 1983 election. Cameron has come from nowhere to be everywhere. Or, rather, he has trodden a glittering path from Eton to Oxford to the polenta suppers of the Notting Hill set, and must now take charge and tell his incandescent Euro-sceptics and pining Thatcherites to get over it.

He is 40. He is gregarious and more confident than anyone you have met. He is so relaxed that he doesn't bother to wear a watch. Apart from his ecological fervour, which isn't remotely fervent when you get close up, he is a conventional type, with his membership of the old London men's club White's and his country weekends.

He can scratch a pig's back so effectively that the creature sighs (this I saw with my own eyes); he can castrate a ram with a pair of pliers (I didn't see this, thank god).

His wife, an heiress and baronet's daughter, may be creative director of Bond Street stationers Smythson, but he isn't fashionable, give or take a penchant for fancy trainers. He drives a Volkswagen Caravelle, with room for the wheelchair, owns one suit by Timothy Everest, a couple by Paul Smith, most from Marks & Spencer. Recently he was voted runner-up to Bond actor Daniel Craig in a best-dressed list, which tells you more about his media popularity - and Britons' need to celebrate finally getting an exciting Leader of Her Majesty's Opposition - than it does his tailoring. Unlike Blair, Cameron wears his leadership lightly: there is none of the restlessness that classically marks out innovators, itchy to be getting on with it. Maybe part of him is wondering if it is all a dream.

We don't know what his main policies are yet. His "policy renewal" is still under way, but he thinks backbone matters more than detail. He pushes ecology, families, tax breaks for married couples, equality; he has ditched the bit of the manifesto he drafted for Howard at the last election that offered a chance to use National Health Service money and go private. He has no private healthcare.

"Lunch is ready," his wife says. Shall we continue our interview later, I ask. "No, let's wrap it up now, then we can have a nice lunch." Cameron has cooked every part of half a pig successfully except the trotters. The salty ham we eat is from the local farm shop, and so is the pork pie; the smoked mackerel pate is a Cameron specialty. In the kitchen sits a pumpkin the size of a football, grown in his garden. That night the editor of The Sun, Rebekah Wade, will be treated to a Jamie Oliver roast-chicken recipe cooked by Cameron. The cottage, a converted barn, is tranquil; there are scuffed carpets, comfy sofas, tonnes of framed family pictures, one of Samantha in a bikini "looking like Marilyn Monroe", according to her besotted husband.

At lunch, on this apparently typical Saturday, there are two friends present, Chris and Venetia, an Economist journalist and a publisher, with their children. It is a casual gathering; the toast for the pate is plonked straight on the table in front of me, so I hand a slice to Chris, who seems unbothered.

Samantha eats salad with her fingers, cheerfully asking if anyone wants the mango because it needs eating up today. Do I want some milk in my coffee? My host sets down a two-litre bottle of semi-skimmed on the table. "Here you are!" he smiles. ("Home from home," I smile back, but I don't mean it: being of a lower social order, I'd have feared judgment and found a jug.) There is a babble of chat about what a Stalinist Brown is and a laugh when Cameron says he has never heard of the girl who describes him as a "good kisser" in a new biography. "She must have snogged my brother."

With his brains and stellar education, and the connections of a Waugh-like jeunesse doree, Cameron was always destined for a fine life, so why inflict the miseries of political leadership on himself?

He has seen the stress, the opprobrium and ridicule heaped on Blair; how the job saps energy, ages you, makes wives targets, children vulnerable or spoiled, or both. Surely the rigours are worth suffering only in the cause of a burning belief, which Cameron seems rather proud of lacking? But no, for an ambitious man like this, the cachet of the top job is more than enough to justify its hardships.

"I distrust people with too much of a mission," he says. "Other people's missions often involve everyone else making huge sacrifices. I am distrustful of the grand plan. It's not me."

Why does Cameron want to be PM? "I think I could do a good job," he says. "I can put a team together and I have an idea that drives me, which is giving people more control over their lives." He is a career rather than a conviction politician, but too highborn to be written off as a mere scaler of the greasy pole. He is a scion of the class that, deep down, believes it was born to rule; this does not, by the way, make its members bad at the job, just lazy in their assumptions about how hard they need to fight to get there.

He and Samantha attended Margaret Thatcher's intimate 77th birthday lunch, but her new bronze statue in parliament unnerves him. "I feel she is pointing her finger at me," he laughs with a shudder.

If he can make inroads into northern cities such as Newcastle, where the Tories are a ghost party - there only in spirit - maybe that iron gaze will soften.

Cameron calls himself a "liberal Conservative", innately suspicious of state action, a champion of continuity, community and, yes, society. "People don't want you to tear everything up and if I become prime minister I won't," he says. "Pragmatism and common sense are what's important. We fear people who have great utopian visions."

Cameron's background is as much of an asset as it is an encumbrance. It sugars the pill of his velvet revolution, reassures the loyalists as they puzzle over his refusal to repeal inheritance tax. And in some ways Cameron is more of a traditional male Tory than his eco-trainers would have us believe.

He admits to being "a dinosaur" about education, believing in learning by rote; he talks of pupils obeying teachers, claims in an interview on housing that "an Englishman's home is his castle". Indeed. In his Oxfordshire constituency, with Blenheim Palace, touristy Woodstock and the village of Bladon, where Winston Churchill is buried, he has the "happiest moments of my week".

When it comes to remembering his past, he has borrowed his pal Boris Johnson's "blissful sponge of amnesia". Sensible. The only childhood worth claiming for those in public life is one spent escaping deprived council estates; anything more elicits envy, derision or a yawn. The third of four children, he grew up in a rectory in Peasemore, near Newbury, with ponies and air rifles and a spaniel called Susie. Descended from "a long line of stockbrokers", at seven he was sent to Heatherdown prep school near Ascot, where the younger royal princes were educated.

At Eton he played tennis, went to the pub. "I didn't spend my whole time reading Hansard." Wouldn't he consider Eton for little Elwen? "No, you shouldn't have to pay vast sums of money for a good education."

At Brasenose College, Oxford, he studied philosophy, politics and economics, joined the union but did not debate, and won a first. He joined the party's research department in 1988. He met Samantha properly in late 1992 when she was invited by his younger sister Clare on a family holiday to Italy.

"We didn't get married until 1996; we were engaged for years," he says. "I think she was too embarrassed to tell her friends she was going out with a Tory."

After only a year as a special adviser at the Treasury and a year at the Home Office, Cameron left the Westminster village to run corporate communications at former television stations owner Carlton, where the then chairman, Michael Green, predicted a future for him on the company's board. "I wanted to make money and learn about business in case politics didn't work out," Cameron says.

He won the safe seat of Witney in 2001, arriving at the Commons on the same day as Osborne, and with other like-minded young Tories dared to dream of a party revival, based on Blair's warm appeal rather than Thatcher's iron fist. So far the project has worked in the south, nurtured by Cameron's ability to deliver a simple message well and his agile side-stepping of thorny issues such as immigration and Europe.

Was I impressed by Cameron? Oh, yes. He is blessed with charisma and authority. Was I suspicious of him? Naturally. Is he driven more by personal ambition and private happiness than a crusade to reinvent the world? No doubt about it.

On a trip to Bradford to inspect a regeneration project, he is joined by that sleek old beast Michael Heseltine, who begins a long, head-down mumble to Cameron about the crushing grip Brown, then still the chancellor, has on Whitehall.

Cameron nods, replying that Brown has a "great brain" but that he will struggle with responsiveness as PM, being too much of a planner. "We're quite happy Blair's going," he tells Heseltine. "He's trying to get out of the shit and can't. Brown thinks he still can, so we have to push his face back in it." For a conciliatory Libran, this man relishes a fight more than you'd imagine.

The Sunday Times