Rory Stewart

In short, as a fellow academic who was applying to be a Labour MP observed, I was perhaps if not a Conservative, then at least a Tory.

There was a lull. He gazed like an emperor out of the window, down onto Parliament Square. I explained that I had been a Labour Party member at eighteen but had voted Lib Dem in 1997. ‘Do you think,’ I asked coyly, ‘I should be an MP?’ Now it was his turn to encourage my ambitions and flatter me as I had him. With perhaps as little conviction. ‘Absolutely,’ he said, ‘it is the best, the only, the great game. But for God’s sake don’t become a Lib Dem, the point is to be a minister,’ said the former leader of the Lib Dems. ‘Lib Dems get nothing done.

I was led from the glass terminal into an older building, which had once been a police headquarters. Four men sat in Cameron’s outer office, with floppy hair and open-necked white shirts: speechwriter, head of strategy, chief of staff, chancellor’s chief of staff, all Old Etonians. I knew them because I had also gone to Eton, and I liked some of them. But I was astonished that Cameron could have filled his private office in this way. I employed 300 people in Kabul, including thirty foreigners, and not one had been to my school.

Outside this office, Cameron had launched a campaign to bring in women and people from working-class and minority-ethnic backgrounds to be MPs – people like the British Asian public affairs professional Priti Patel, or the state-educated think-tank director Liz Truss. He would promote them fast so that he could announce, proudly, to the media that his Cabinet was the most diverse in history. Nor did he ever miss a chance to insist that ‘diversity makes government better’. And yet his real inner team, and his closest friends, with whom he developed policy, were drawn from an unimaginably narrow social group