Call Me Dave by Michael Ashcroft and Isabel Oakeshott review – a pig in a poke

Revenge may be a dish best served cold; the question is, where should it be served? In a book or a newspaper, and, if a newspaper, which?

In 2011, Isabel Oakeshott memorably set out the possibilities in her conspiratorial email conversation with Vicky Pryce, who was eager to destroy her former husband Chris Huhne’s political career by disclosing his lies about a speeding offence. Pryce and her friend, the then judge Constance Briscoe, were already in preliminary talks with a journalist from the Mail on Sunday about a “tell-all” book and its potential for serialisation. Oakeshott, who worked for the Sunday Times, gave it the thumbs down. “I think your reputation would be really damaged … the Mail on Sunday is – at the end of the day – a fairly downmarket publication and a lot of people would think it a bit tawdry for you to be cooperating with them,” she wrote. “I know it’s got a big readership, but so has the News of the World!” People, she continued, would assume Pryce had made money from the deal, which would affect her reputation and any chance of her joining the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee or “perhaps even the House of Lords”.

In Oakeshott’s view, that left Pryce a choice: she could “do the book, but give serialisation rights to a more respectable newspaper, ie the Sunday Times. This is an OK option. But the downside is it would be a lot of time and effort … and you would have to provide an awful lot of material. Eighty thousand words – the minimum for a book that doesn’t look like a leaflet! – is a huge amount of material. It would also most likely be a struggle to find a publisher; nobody would make money from it; but still, people would think you’d made money from it – and that would be damaging.”

Or, “the best option”, she could tell her story “in a major two part series in the Sunday Times (ghostwritten by me)”. She was confident that these ghosted pieces and the associated news coverage would inflict “maximum and perhaps fatal damage on Chris, if you are prepared to talk openly about the [driving] licence points … without seriously damaging your own reputation in the process”.

As it turned out, all these strategies had a serious flaw – the self-inflicted wound. Pryce as well as Huhne went to prison for intending to pervert the course of justice. (Briscoe did too.) But if this revenger’s tragedy is looked at from what might be called a purely literary perspective, then Oakeshott is right. The two-part newspaper serial is a much better option than a book: why surround 5,000 riveting, damaging words with 75,000 words of mush? Publishers – authors, too – are sometimes remarkably resistant to this argument. Texts published between hard covers still manage to convey authority and respectability as their narratives trudge towards the index. Unlike newspaper or magazines pieces, they lead independent lives as properties that can generate revenue from sales and serialisation rights, and draw attention from the full spectrum of the media, of which review pages form only a tiny part. If a book can be embargoed – that is, held back from any form of preliminary circulation to people such as reviewers – then so much the better. Newspapers will get full value from their exclusive extracts and the idea will get around that the book contains something interesting and dangerous. Finally, among these non-literary reasons to prefer the book over the article, length can provide a vengeful but nervous writer with a kind of Christmas pudding in which shiny sixpences of malice are half-hidden among the sugary dough.

Michael (Lord) Ashcroft had some of this in mind, presumably, when he hired Oakeshott as his co-author on the Cameron project for a fee reported to be £500,000. That kind of money would be enough to make most of us revisit our previous advice about getting grudges over with in 5,000 words, and Oakeshott has done her best to provide Ashcroft with what he likes to call an “objective” biography. Bookended by Ashcroft’s preface and appendix, it runs to more than 600 pages, few of which tell us anything new.

Oakeshott isn’t afraid of bathos. Of the so-called Chipping Norton set, she writes: “Theirs is a world of helicopters, domestic staff, summers in St Tropez and fine food from Daylesford, the organic farm shop owned by Lady Carole Bamford”, as though a pot of yoghurt and a private aircraft could be held in the same scales. The tone throughout is murkily circumspect – “willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike”, in the words of Alexander Pope. “Fairly or unfairly, social gatherings among the upper echelons of society in this part of west Oxfordshire have acquired a reputation for featuring narcotics.” “Though there is no proof that she [Samantha Cameron] took recreational drugs, a number of those who know her have privately suggested that this was the case … Either way it did not affect her studies … ”

Drugs are one of the book’s obsessions, but the sound here as elsewhere is of a reporter digging for dirt without much reward. The story of young Cameron poking his penis into a hog’s head must therefore have seemed like gold. Fortune had smiled at last on the diggers. Oakeshott tries to muster outrage in the telling – the act is “shocking”, “outrageous”, “extraordinary” and “bizarre” – but the photograph that is said to exist is never produced and the source, an MP and “distinguished contemporary” of Cameron’s though he may be, is never directly quoted or named.

But forget about the pig. Oakeshott would have done better to outrage us by being clearer about the reasons for Cameron’s effortless progress. More than once, she refers to his superb connections smoothing his way upwards, easing him into gap-year internships as well as his political career, but she ducks a biographer’s duty and reaches no conclusion about his character. The book is like a trial without a judge. Many witnesses are produced – some of them are even named – but their evidence offers few insights. Yes, he was a snot, say some. No, he wasn’t, say others. On the one hand, he was well connected. On the other, well, there was more to him than that. The moral seems to be that every story has two sides. “It is testament to Cameron that few Old Etonians have anything seriously disobliging to say about their old classmate,” is a sentence to be treasured.

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The level of intrusion and hypocrisy can be repellent. At one point the book recounts that Samantha once regaled guests at a party “with a colourful account of how she and Cameron became so intoxicated on holiday in Morocco that they vomited”. Then in a caption it describes a picture of the couple attending the funeral of their young son as “an unbearably poignant image”. The mixture of gossipy censure and ghoulish sentimentality is confusing, and one of several symptoms of the larger muddle that lies at the book’s heart. In his preface, Ashcroft says he wants to be clear about “my motivation for writing this book, which … is not about settling scores” but simply because “it seemed timely” to produce a new Cameron biography. In the light of Oakeshott’s contribution, it would have been more accurate for him to have said “my motivation for causing this book to be written”, but set that aside. Who honestly can believe him? Certainly not the Daily Mail, which began its serialisation under the banner headline “REVENGE!”.

Ashcroft was the Tory party’s treasurer between 1998 and 2001 and its deputy chairman from 2005 to 2010. As a non-dom – a resident of the UK but a citizen of Belize – he avoided tax on his enormous wealth, £8m of which went into Tory funds. In his preface, Ashcroft writes that Cameron was aware of his tax status a year before investigations by the Labour party made it into a public issue prior to the 2010 general election – none of it, says Ashcroft, could have surprised him. During earlier discussions, Ashcroft believed he and Cameron had agreed “the type of role” he would play in a Cameron government. Nevertheless, when Cameron formed his coalition the call from Downing Street didn’t come.

“I made full and contemporaneous notes of our discussion,” Ashcroft writes, like a man in possession of the negative, “but … this book is not the place to reveal more of that conversation, which I will detail in my eventual autobiography”.

So by the second page there we have it: one important question about when Cameron knew, the promise of a proper revelation at some unknown point in the future. We need read no more. A thousand words in a newspaper would have the story done and dusted, and yet 35,000 copies of a thick book priced £20 lie waiting in the warehouses and the shops. The motto is irresistible: never buy a pig in a poke.