The Original Swan

Peter Hitchens writes:

I see that the Tory blogger Iain Dale (egged on by some of his contributors) has been jeering at my questions for David Cameron, published on this site two weeks ago. Iain said: ‘Oh purrrlease. Peter knows very well that every political leader gets hundreds of interview requests every month. Quite why David Cameron would choose to grant an interview to a columnist who has been uniformly hostile to him is anyone's guess. He then goes on to list the eight questions he would ask Cameron were he given the chance. Most of them make Jim Naughtie's questions look short and illustrate the pointlessness of Cameron being interviewed by Hitchens.

What on earth would it achieve?’

Well, as Iain must have realised, the questions were couched as they were partly because I knew they wouldn't be answered, and the explanatory bits which emerge in conversation had to be, as it were, front-loaded. As for why Mr Cameron should choose to grant such an interview, I think it perfectly reasonable for the public to expect would-be prime ministers to subject themselves to questioning from critics. A confident politician should be able to cope with hostile cross-examination, and if he isn't willing to undergo it, the public should know, and draw appropriate conclusions.

Iain then added: ‘Next, he'll be suggesting that Gordon Brown should give an exclusive interview to Andrew Rawnsley...’, and indeed why not? It would certainly be more interesting than the interview Mr Cameron gave to a very friendly Mr Rawnsley in his recent Channel Four Dispatches programme about the Tory Leader (this was a pale shadow of the one I made for the same station a few years ago, despite the very significant fact that Mr Cameron happily talked on the record to Mr Rawnsley, a journalist closely identified with New Labour, but refused to do the same for me, a conservative). Incidentally, the C4 programme looked thoroughly out-of-date by the time I saw it, since it assumed throughout that a Tory victory was guaranteed, a certainty that must have grown more and more frayed as the programme went through its final production stages.

I teased Mr Rawnsley at the Bath Literary Festival the other day about why he, who I think could fairly be described as a man of the left, should have published a book likely to damage a Labour Prime Minister just before a general election. And this still seems to me to be a very important question, reflecting much more on the true nature of the Cameron Tories than on the true feelings of the Blairite media pack. The Blairites are now in a bit of a fix, having pretty much accustomed themselves to the idea of a Cameron government run by people like them, because the uncertainty about the election result means they are rather less free than they were before. If a Labour victory is still possible, then they are under some pressure to rally to the flag in the final weeks of the election, even if it is Gordon Brown waving that flag. I can only laugh at this dilemma.

As for Sir Trevor McDonald's woeful encounter with the Cameron family on Sunday night, what is one to say? Sir Trevor's hushed, reverential approach produced a hushed and reverential programme, and - while I accept that you can sometimes get more out of people by not being aggressive - this wasn't one of those times. As for the allegedly tough tigers of the airwaves, Jeremy Paxman and John Humphrys, they don't in my view have the background which enables them to approach Mr Cameron from a position of sceptical conservatism. So when is he ever going to be questioned on behalf of this large constituency?

One small point about the McDonald programme. I was enthralled by the encounters with Mrs Cameron, not because of what she said (which was predictable and properly loyal) but because of the accent in which she said it. Mrs Cameron is the eldest daughter of a Baronet, grew up on a 300-acre estate in Lincolnshire, attended St Helen and St Katherine's school in Abingdon and then Marlborough College. Yet she speaks in pure Estuary English, and I could swear I heard her say 'somefink' instead of 'something' at one point. This wasn't the glorious, swaggering raffish old patrician cockney that Winston Churchill, Edward VIII and (the last MP to do so) Julian Amery used to employ. It was the speech of Bluewater and Big Brother.

Why would someone with such a background talk like this, especially when most of her business must be with London's moneyed, cut-glass classes? I know (who should know better?) that the Celia Johnson/ Trevor Howard vowels of postwar middle class England have long ago had to be suppressed by anyone who doesn't want to be beaten up on the night bus, but this wasn't camouflage. It was the way she talked when interviewed by a Knight of the Realm. It may not be important, but it's certainly interesting.

We were also told (by an old Etonian pal) that all that Bullingdon Club stuff wasn't really the point about David Cameron's Oxford years. What he really liked was playing Pool. Right. Of course. I look forward with interest to the photographs of David Cameron in his shellsuit, pictured alongside the other members of the Oxford University Pool and Darts Association, outside the 'Original Swan' in Cowley.