Cameron's sure-footed journey to the top

LONDON - You don't have to be a swivel-eyed conspiracy theorist to think that David Cameron was bound to be Prime Minister one day.

His intelligence and upbringing in greenest, most comfortable Berkshire meant he was better-placed than most to get where he wanted.

His family history, with a line of Tory MPs on his mother's side stretching back generations, gave him an implicit Conservatism and a freedom to be pragmatic that his more doctrinaire contemporaries envied.

He is no accidental politician. He had to want it, and, boy, did he want it. It is possible to construct a theory that he decided in his early teens that he wanted to be Prime Minister.

Friends recall the alarmingly self-confident young man sitting at the breakfast table, proudly announcing that one day he would lead the Conservative Party.

He was confident to the verge of bumptiousness at Eton, contemp-oraries recall.

He failed to get into Pop, the school's set of prefects, and the fear of failure to which he admits may stem from not clearing this hurdle.

But contemporaries also remember him in his early years there as a good-natured and amusing boy who didn't stand out in any way.

After O-levels, though, he took off. He has spoken recently of how his near-expulsion from the school for smoking cannabis shook him up. That episode disappointed his parents hugely, and he took it on board. When he began studying politics at A-level, it was the making of him.

John Clarke, who taught Cameron politics as he prepared for entrance to Oxford, says: "He was very much a late developer academically, one who came good once he did a series of subjects that suited him. He didn't make a great splash at Eton, but, of all the people I taught, he was one of the most impressive.

"He found politics stimulating, in a good pragmatic Conservative way. He was intrigued by politics as an art, as a way of resolving problems."

Another teacher, Andrew Gailey, identifies a trend among academic late-developers.

"People who do that although they grow in confidence more and more, they are never as confident as those who have started at the top. And there's a sense in which he has always wanted to push himself and test himself more, not waste his time."

Cameron worked for his godfather Tim Rathbone, a Tory MP, during the university holidays.

Rathbone was as far from being a Thatcherite as a Tory MP could have been, and numbered the ANC's Oliver Tambo among his friends. If Cameron calls himself a "One Nation" Tory, the chances are he has Rathbone in mind.

Cameron progressed from Oxford to the Conservative Research Department.

He worked on John Major's successful election campaign in 1992, and gained Whitehall experience under Norman Lamont and Michael Howard.

In the mid-1990s he ceased being a special adviser to work in the real world, but only with a view to equipping himself better for politics.

He was nominated for Stafford in 1997, but failed to win.

He considered standing as an MEP, but decided it would be an obstacle to Westminster. He won Witney, Oxfordshire, in 2001.

But his party was in the wilderness. William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Howard failed to dislodge Prime Minister Tony Blair. Cameron studied Blair's how-to-do-it book.

Too many people thought the Tories remained toxic. Blair had achieved a political hegemony.

Britain was becoming more middle-class, and more social democratic.

What need did it have for the Europe-obsessed, ageing Conservatives?

Capitalism had won the Cold War, and a New Labour-managed, softened-edges version of it, with appropriate levels of social care, made the Tories look redundant.

The fact that Cameron has overcome all that to become PM is remarkable.

With so thin a mandate, his personal skills will be essential. As well as the conventional political gifts, his extraordinary capacity for remembering names and his exceptional manners will be assets in battles to come.

At times he has forgotten the niceties, and allowed a perception of a remote clique at the top of the party to grow.

On occasion this year a bunker mentality infected those around him and he has allowed competing voices to muddle the chain of command.

But he is good at learning. He will take the criticisms on board. If leadership is a quality, he has it in spades.

As Gailey puts it: "There is a mindset which is crucial to all winners which is the ability to think of what is to come, not what has just passed - to be able to move on."

That ability to make decisions confidently was also possessed by Blair, and look how long he lasted.

- INDEPENDENT