Is He Thick?

Shame about the Kaminski bit, but Seth Jacobson is otherwise on excellent form:

Conservative leader David Cameron will face the BBC's political interrogator Andrew Marr at the Manchester party conference this Sunday morning – a week after Marr provoked Labour outrage by asking Gordon Brown whether he was on "prescription painkillers and pills".

The pills were a reference to recent rumours that the PM was possibly taking anti-depressants, a claim first given a wide audience by The First Post's Westminster Mole.

With Marr presumably under strict BBC instructions to ensure Cameron gets as tough a ride as Brown, The First Post offers a selection of eight equally intrusive questions he might like to put to the man who hopes to become Britain's next prime minister...

• Subsequent to your 'bust' for smoking cannabis at Eton in 1982, what has been your history of illegal drug use?

Cameron was outed in an biography written in 2007 by Francis Elliott and James Hanning for having smoked marijuana while a 15-year-old schoolboy at Eton (indeed he was lucky to escape expulsion for the offence). Since winning the leadership of the party, he has maintained a complete silence on the issue, despite having told Andrew Rawnsley in the run-up to the 2005 Conservative party leadership election that "I had a normal university experience". What drugs did he take at Oxford? And did he ever come into contact with cocaine while working as a PR man in television, a milieu where use of the drug was commonplace. He remains cagey about his youthful indiscretions, obliquely telling Grazia magazine in August that "when I was 14, 15, 16, I was doing things that teenagers do in terms of drinking too much, being caught having the odd fag, things like that".

• How can the British public trust an Old Etonian and an Old Pauline to understand the daily grind facing most British people?

When the Sunday Times Rich List compiler Philip Beresford valued the Conservative leader in 2007, he said: "I put the combined family wealth of David and Samantha Cameron at £30m plus. Both sides of the family are extremely wealthy." Cameron went to Heatherdown Preparatory School in Berkshire and then on to Eton. His Shadow Chancellor George Osborne, heir to the Osborne & Little fabric and wallpaper firm, enjoyed a similarly privileged education, attending St Paul's before joining Cameron at Oxford. From there both men entered the world of politics through the Conservative Research Department. Both then were parachuted into safe Tory seats - Witney in Oxfordshire for Cameron, the Cheshire Tory hotbed Tatton for Osborne. They move in the same gilded circles, both being key members of the Notting Hill set of Tory MPs and right-leaning journalists. They have rarely had to strive or struggle in life to achieve anything. Can they possibly be attuned to life as it is for the less privileged members of society?

• Is it right that you should keep George Osborne as Chancellor after his various faux pas?

The Shadow Chancellor has come under sustained fire in recent months. He was caught out last autumn when hedge funder Nathanial Rothschild – another fellow Oxford graduate - claimed Osborne had tapped up Oleg Deripaska for an illegal donation to the Tories during a meeting on the Russian billionaire's yacht. Osborne denies the accusation. Since then he has been labelled "amateurish" by a front bench colleague after casually announcing that he would cut £27bn of defence projects on taking office, despite many of them being well-advanced, such as the Eurofighter/Typhoon. He also suffered a withering putdown from David Blanchflower, a former member of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee - and the only one to predict the recession. Blanchflower wrote in the New Statesman of Osborne's proposed economic plans that "it is not hard to work out that, with unemployment rising fast, it isn't the right time to cut public sector jobs, wages or public spending for that matter. Mr Osborne, I really don't know which economists are advising you on this brilliant strategy to increase unemployment, but feel free to give me a call. Unemployment makes voters unhappy."

• What's the payback for your endorsement by Rupert Murdoch's Sun newspaper?

Under a front-page banner headline 'LABOUR'S LOST IT', the Sun came out for the Tories on Wednesday. At least one Labour minister is arguing that the media mogul's change of allegiance is related to Cameron's pledge to slim down "by a huge amount" the TV regulatory body Ofcom, which has been threatening to restrict the sports subscription service offered by Murdoch's BSkyB. Murdoch's hatred of the Lisbon Treaty is also an issue: one of the key reasons why Murdoch fell out with Labour is that Tony Blair promised a referendum but went back on his word. Cameron has promised a referendum if today's Irish referendum votes No and the treaty has still not been ratified by the time of the election. But it is not clear what the Tories will do if the Irish vote Yes today – as polls predict –and the treaty has been ratified by May 2010. Cameron has promised he will "not let matters rest" - and Murdoch and the Sun will doubtless be egging him on.

• How do you defend your support of the ultra-right-wing Pole, Michal Kaminski?

After the 2009 European Elections, the Tories joined the ECR political grouping in the European Parliament. This bloc of 54 MEPs (including 25 Conservatives) includes parties that campaign for women to remain at home taking care of children and against abortion (Holland's Christian Union); aim to impose time limits on unemployment benefits (Lijst Dedecker, from Belgium); are fiercely nationalistic, demanding strict controls on citizenship and language and participate in an annual event commemorating the Latvian Waffen SS (Latvia's For Fatherland and Freedom party); and that oppose homosexuals being school teachers (Poland's Law and Justice party). At the July election for the leadership of the bloc, David Cameron directed his party to support the Law and Justice party's Michal Kaminski bid to become chairman. Conservative MEP Edward McMillan-Scott had the party whip withdrawn from him for challenging Kaminski. McMillan-Scott says Kaminski is "totally unfit" for high office, having previously been a member of a "fascist and homophobic" party.

• Toby Young, writing about your time together at Brasenose College, Oxford, described you as "a slippery character who operated behind the scenes". What did he mean?

Young's account of Boris Johnson and David Cameron's years together at Eton and Oxford, When Boris Met Dave, will be broadcast on More4 next week. Young recalls how the Bullingdon drinking club, an infamous photograph of which has already caused Cameron trouble for highlighting his privileged background, would book restaurants under false names, trash them during drunken parties, then pay off the owners of the establishments. One night the club went on the rampage through Oxford, as described by Young in the Daily Mail: "One of them threw a plant pot through the plate-glass window of a restaurant, triggering the burglar alarm. The police arrived, complete with sniffer dogs, and six of the group were arrested." David Cameron, Young notes, was the "only member of the Buller not arrested".

• Did you suppress the infamous Bullingdon Club photograph?

In early 2007, a photograph began circulating that showed the club members circa 1986, including David Cameron and Boris Johnson. It briefly appeared in the press before it was quickly withdrawn by the company that holds it copyright. Gillman & Soames claim they acted for commercial reasons, and had no communication from Conservative Central Office, who also denied seeking to hide the photograph. However, Labour was widely reported at the time to be planning to use the picture in election materials, with the party's former deputy leader Roy Hattersley deeming it of greater embarrassment value to Cameron than claims about drug abuse. Journalist Peter Hitchens told the BBC: "I think it tells us something about David Cameron that he doesn't much want us to know - that he is not the ordinary bloke that he claims to be."

• You claim to like the music of The Smiths, Radiohead and the Arctic Monkeys - do you actually know what they're singing about?

David Cameron says Radiohead are one of his favourite bands, and told Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs in 2006 that he had asked the band if they would play the song Fake Plastic Trees for him at a Friends of the Earth benefit gig. The claim was swiftly rebutted by the band, well-known for its attacks on George W Bush (the inspiration for their album Hail to the Thief), while frontman Thom Yorke has been passionately opposed to the war in Iraq, which the Tory leader supported. Cameron's much-vaunted admiration for The Smiths and their frontman Morrissey is odd, too. The Manchester band were unambiguously political during their brief career during the 1980s, attacking the monarchy and the Tory government of the time, and espousing vegetarianism. Morrissey went further on his first solo album Viva Hate, with a song titled Margaret on the Guillotine.

When told that The Jam's class warfare anthem Eton Rifles was a Cameron favourite, Paul Weller remarked: "Is he thick? He probably thinks Eton Rifles is a song about him and his mates."