For the Record. David Cameron
the House of Commons and the House of Lords, attending select committees, watching what happened in the chambers, and absorbing the atmosphere of the place as it was in the middle of the Thatcher years. I remember the booming voice of Ian Paisley as I got into a lift with him. I recall going to watch Harold Macmillan’s maiden speech in the House of Lords, in which he criticised Thatcher’s handling of the miners’ strike.
From the House of Commons I went to Hong Kong. I was determined to work abroad rather than just travel, and was fortunate in having connections through my father with the Keswick family and the age-old Far East trading company Jardine Matheson. Jardines had made its first fortune selling opium to the Chinese in the 1840s. That association would complicate some of my first visits to China as leader of the Conservative Party and as prime minister. In November 2010 the Chinese were incensed that my team and I were wearing poppies for Remembrance Sunday, suspecting that they symbolised the opium trade, and the two wars Britain fought to keep that trade open, with which they believed my family was personally associated. They insisted that we remove them before our meetings with the president and the premier in the Great Hall of the People. The official Foreign Office advice, delivered at the embassy in whispers accompanied by loud music, under the assumption that the Chinese were listening in to what was being said, was that we should acquiesce. We refused, and there was a brief stand-off during which it looked as if the entire trip would be cancelled. In the end they relented: the poppies stayed on, and the visit went ahead. The Chinese have very long memories.
Hong Kong in 1985 was a pretty nervous place. The joint declaration with China securing the end of British rule in 1997 had recently been signed, and Jardine Matheson had announced the transfer of its headquarters from Hong Kong to Bermuda. I was sent to the Jardine Shipping Agency, where I found myself the only Westerner in an office of over a hundred Hong Kong Chinese. Our job was to book cargo onto container and other ships, and to look after the ships and their captains as they came into the harbour. My role was that of ‘ship jumper’, sent out in a small boat, or ‘lighter’, to board the big liners, meet the captain and ensure that everything went smoothly. It was an interesting job for someone who was only eighteen, and I learned a lot.
From Hong Kong I travelled to Japan, and then to the Soviet Union. Ever since hearing the Russian Nobel Prize-winning author and dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn speak, I had wanted to visit the country. I had read about the Trans-Siberian Railway, and thought that would be a good way of doing so. The trip had a profound effect on me.
The train did not set off from its traditional starting point, the historic port of Vladivostok, which back then was a military base and closed to tourists. Instead we began our journey in a dreary grey town called Nakhodka, and joined the traditional route at Khabarovsk. I spent the next six days in ‘hard class’, sharing a compartment with two male students from East Germany and Russia, and a female student from Japan.
It’s hard to convey now just how grim the Soviet Union looked and felt in the mid-1980s. I boarded the train full of excitement about this epic journey, but at the first stop most of the food disappeared as local people rushed on board and bought or bartered everything they possibly could. I had brought some oranges from Japan, as I’d been warned about the shortage of fruit and vegetables. I remember people on the train watching me with fascination as I peeled and ate them, as if they’d never seen these things before.
The well-worn clichés that young Russians and East Europeans were desperate for Western music and jeans turned out to be absolutely true, and these were the first subject of conversation with my two east European travelling companions. But the thing I will never forget is the stories they told me about just how grey and oppressive life was in East Germany and Russia, and how jealous they were of the West. How they knew that their leaders were lying to them, and that the propaganda about their countries’ success was nonsense. My new East German friend flicked through my cassette collection and announced that, ‘While you have great music records we just have tractor-production records, and they’re all lies.’
I was a George Orwell junky, having read Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Homage to Catalonia several times over. I knew the history and the theory, and here was the living proof of communism’s total failure. When, a couple of years earlier, Ronald Reagan had called the Soviet Union an ‘evil empire’, many people in the West had thought he was guilty of crass overstatement. I came firmly to the conclusion that he was totally right. From that train ride onwards I was never in any doubt that in the battle between the democratic, capitalist West and the communist, state-controlled East, we were on the right side. For my political generation the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was a seminal moment, and for those of us who distrusted socialism, and hated what communism had done to eastern and central Europe, it was a moment of great ideological confirmation.
At the end of the epic railway journey – day upon day of mountains, rivers and never-ending silver birches – I met my friend Anthony Griffith in Moscow, and we travelled together around the Soviet Union. Most visitors at that time would be part of an official Intourist-organised group, and because we were travelling on our own we attracted quite a lot of interest from the authorities. We hadn’t booked transfers from trains to hotels or anything like that, yet we tended to be met at every station or airport by a man in a long dark overcoat who already seemed to know where we were going.
Our itinerary caused me to make a diplomatic gaffe many years later. I was making small talk with Vladimir Putin at the G8, and told him about my extensive travels around his country. As I reeled off the list of cities I had visited – Moscow, Leningrad, Yalta, Kiev … – he stopped me to say, ‘Yalta and Kiev are no longer part of my country.’ In that moment I glimpsed the intense personal pain that the break-up of the Soviet Union had caused this old-fashioned Russian nationalist.
And it was in what is now Ukraine, on the beach at the Black Sea resort of Yalta, that Anthony and I were approached by two young men. One of them spoke perfect English, the other spoke French and some English. We never discovered what they were doing on a beach that was reserved for foreigners, but we didn’t see any harm in accepting their invitation to have lunch and then dinner with them. They lavished vodka, sturgeon and caviar on us. We weren’t naïve, and our suspicions increased when they started trying to goad us into criticising Britain and the British government. We made our excuses and left.
Later, when I arrived at university, I asked my politics tutor and mentor Vernon Bogdanor whether I had been right to be suspicious, and he was pretty convinced it was an attempt to recruit us.
As we crossed into a bleak and depressed Romania, most of my books about politics were confiscated by a bad-tempered border guard as ‘inappropriate’. We then meandered our way through Transylvania to Hungary, and on to Vienna and Salzburg, where I was finally able to meet the Austrian woman, Marie Helene Schlumberger, who had run off with my now long-dead grandfather. She regaled us with stories of Austria before the war, the Russian occupation (which was only lifted in 1955) and my grandfather – ‘my darling Donald’ – while plying us with schnapps.
I was happy to be back in the West. It was time to go home, and then to university.
Although I went to Oxford frequently as a child, and although it is the capital of the county I represented in Parliament for fifteen years, I still feel a huge buzz every time I set foot back in the university part of the city.
I felt a great sense of privilege at being able to walk Oxford’s streets, study in the university’s great libraries and live in a magnificent and historic college. The college system brings people together in a way some other universities fail to do. The tutorial system means you have direct access, either on your own or in a very small group, to some of the finest minds in the world.
When people ask me what I most loved about being at Oxford, it wasn’t the politics. I hardly took part. My fascination with politics was developing, but for some reason I didn’t want to play at it. I visited the Oxford Union a few times, and saw stars like Boris Johnson, already a very funny speaker, and masters of debate like Nick Robinson, who would later become political editor of the BBC.
It wasn’t the sport that made Oxford special either. I briefly captained the