‘Yes, Cameron, but who rolled the joint?’
An On This Day tale of the man who taught four prime ministers (and a future King)
Spent Saturday, the hottest day ever (*please check) in the spare room shouting at the wall, rehearsing my stand-up show, Making A Meal Of It. Some of the material I know works because I’ve done it front of audiences before, some of it is new, but the wall was indifferent to both. At the back of my mind the whole time is the fact that the show isn’t selling as well as last year’s tour, despite having quadrupled my radio audience in the past 12 months (I just can’t wang on about it on the BBC). Anyway, if you think you know someone who might enjoy a funny romp around politics, through the prism of food, do point them towards mattchorley.com. Every little helps. Thanks.
Eric Anderson’s desk, Eton
Wednesday, 2 June 1982
There are many reasons I have not become prime minister. Not going to university probably hasn’t helped – just eight of the fifty-eight PMs in our history didn’t have a degree. Although it’s notable that they include the Duke of Wellington, Winston Churchill and Benjamin Disraeli, as well as more recent non-graduates John Major and Jim Callaghan. Going to the right school also helps: twenty of the fifty-eight went to Eton. But having the right teacher perhaps matters most. And I was never taught by Eric Anderson.
A tall, slightly stooped, kindly man, Anderson, it seems, was a political genius. Or a disaster, depending on how you think the country has been run for most of the past quarter-century. After studying English at St Andrews and Oxford, he went straight into teaching, beginning a career which would help shape modern Britain in a way he could never have predicted. He joined first Fettes College, the elite Edinburgh school, before moving to Gordonstoun, the rather grim Scottish boarding school where one of his pupils was the future King Charles. Between bouts of homesickness and bullying, the young prince was coaxed by Anderson into taking the lead role in a production of Macbeth.
Having bagged a future king, when he returned to Fettes for a second stint Anderson’s office was regularly visited by his first future prime minister. ‘He was forever knocking at my study door,’ he would later recall. ‘Round it would come the grinning Blair face, which said, “Sir, I don’t think this rule or that rule is right. Can we change it?”’ The Shakespearean political drama also continued, with young Anthony Blair taking the role of Mark Antony in Julius Caesar dressed in a red toga.
In 1980 Anderson moved to Eton, to teach not one but two future PMs: David Cameron, who described him as one of the most popular headmasters in the school’s history, and Boris Johnson, who Anderson said was ‘without doubt’ the most interesting pupil he had ever had.
Johnson’s future modus operandi was clear in his school days. Anderson bumped into him hours before a big essay was due, and he had not even started writing. When it arrived, it was ‘very stimulating’. When some students took on a staging of Richard III, Johnson – who had the childhood ambition of ‘World King’ – took the title role. ‘He hadn’t had time to learn the lines, so had pasted them up behind various pillars,’ Anderson told Johnson’s biographer Andrew Gimson. ‘The whole performance consisted of him running from one side of the stage to the other and failing to read it properly.’ A star, and a star’s approach to preparation, was born. Other Old Etonians whose dramatic skills were better honed on Anderson’s watch include actors Damian Lewis and Dominic West.
Anderson kept on moving. In 1995 he became rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, where one of the students during his time was his fourth future PM. Rishi Sunak was studying philosophy, politics and economics and graduated with a first in 2001, the year after Anderson had returned again to Eton, this time as provost. Having just missed Prince William during his time away at Oxford, he was at Eton for much of Prince Harry’s later years as a pupil. During his stints at Eton Anderson combined a traditional conservatism with an understanding of the need to modernise, including abolishing the cane and sending his privileged pupils into poorer inner cities for visits.
Of the many incidents that crossed his many desks during half a century of teaching, there was perhaps none so consequential for the future of politics as the scandal which engulfed Eton in the summer of 1982. ‘Seven boys have been expelled from Eton for using cannabis,’ The Daily Telegraph reported on 3 June 1982. ‘They told police that their shared interest in reggae music led them to the London dealers who sold them the drug.’ Anderson was quoted as denying that there was any sort of drug ring at the school, insisting that he had ‘nipped things in the bud’ with the seven expulsions. It could have been – in fact should have been – eight.
As the May 1982 exam season approached, David Cameron was among pupils who had been getting hold of cannabis, ‘mostly in the form of hash, typically dark-brown and crumbly, although occasionally some “Red Leb”, supposedly from the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon’, he revealed years later in his memoirs. He and two friends would take a rowing boat out to an island in the middle of the River Thames with Cameron, as the smallest, acting as the cox. ‘Once there, we would roll up and spend a summer’s afternoon gently off our heads.’
When the school clamped down on the Eton dealers, his two boating mates were the first to be expelled. Others were caught in the fallout. As time passed, Cameron began to wonder if he might have got away with it. Then he was pulled out of a maths lesson and marched to Anderson’s office. There were signed confessions implicating the 15-year-old, whose future now hung in the balance.
Cameron recalls that the headmaster sitting behind his desk was in fact the most nervous person in the room, grappling with the language of drug-taking. ‘Because I was so keen not to implicate anyone else, I claimed — totally falsely — that I had only smoked cannabis once at Eton, and all the other times were “at home in the village”. This involved me telling a more and more elaborate set of lies.’ A dumbfounded Anderson asked: ‘Yes, Cameron, but who rolled the joint?’ More lies followed. ‘We were dealing with young boys,’ Anderson later told Cameron’s biographers Francis Elliott and James Hanning. ‘And young boys sometimes do silly things.’
Miraculously, Cameron avoided being thrown out with his fellow pot-smokers. He was fined £20, ‘gated’, leaving him unable to leave the school’s grounds, and made to spend the morning of the school open day on 4 June writing out one of Virgil’s Georgics. The brush with the law, and the prospect of expulsion, transformed him into a model student in the sixth form that autumn, thriving on history, art and especially economics, where he got a taste for the free marketeers.
Looking back over Anderson’s career, the decision to let Cameron off was perhaps the most politically significant. Had he taken a tougher line, or disbelieved his pupil’s web of lies, he might only have helped to educate three prime ministers and a king. Which is still not a bad record.
David Anderson’s desk, and what crossed on this day in 1982, is one of my 50 Places That Changed British Politics, which is out in paperback.
For two decades I have feasted on politics, stalking the corridors, pubs and restaurants of Westminster. Now I have all the ingredients to cook up a brand new show looking at parliament's feuding food factions and how politicians really are what they eat. From Keir Starmer’s fish and cheese, to Kemi Badenoch’s hatred of sandwiches, from Nigel Farage’s proper milk to Ed Davey’s fig rolls, everything (and everyone) is on the menu.
WARNING: Politics may contain nuts.
As seen on Have I Got News For You (BBC1), Newsnight (BBC 2) and Lorraine (ITV1).
30th June Norwich Playhouse
1 July Farnham Maltings
2 July Bristol Redgrave Theatre
3 July Lyme Regis Marine Theatre
4 July Oxford North Wall
7 July Canterbury Gulbenkian
8 July Newcastle The Stand
9 July Edinburgh The Stand
10 July Birmingham Glee Club
12 July Salford Lowry
13 July Cheltenham Town Hall
8 November Taunton Brewhouse
10 November London Cambridge Theatre
Well that will do for now. Do hit the like button if you liked it. If you didn’t like it, just keep it to yourself, alright?
Nice article. But photo couldn’t have been taken any time in the last 500 years. Croquet didn’t arrive in England (most likely from Ireland) until the middle of the 19th century. I guess the cars pose a similar problem…
Brilliant piece. I love the reasonably plausible (surely not true) schoolboy line that reggae got them into it!