Lord Cameron of the Louche Country Set
Garter snapped a Bath Oliver between the fingers of his left hand as he held up a glass of Old Bual to the sunshine streaming through the windows of the College of Arms and said: “Well, Cameron, what’s it to be? Lord Chipping Norton or Lord Cameron of Blairmore?”
At least that’s how I imagine the conversation between David Cameron, the new Foreign Secretary, and Garter King of Arms. He is the top herald (with a shield of “argent goutty de sang three cocks’ heads erased”), and it is his job to ensure that peers’ names don’t clash. There is already a Lord Cameron of Dillington, who is the grandson of the man who became chief of Clan Cameron in 1905.
As we now know, the former Mr Cameron settled for Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton, thus invoking not a clan but a set. There used to be the Cliveden Set, a group invented by the journalist Claud Cockburn before the War, accused of appeasing Hitler. “The myth of Cliveden being a nest of appeasers, let alone pro-Nazis, is exploded,” wrote the Churchillian historian Andrew Roberts (Lord Roberts of Belgravia). But it keeps getting unexploded.
Or there was the Clermont Set – James Goldsmith, John Aspinall, Lucian Freud even – who frequented a club in Mayfair.
The Chipping Norton Set had a different flavour. It was in full swing only 10 or 15 years ago, yet, outside political wonkery, the details of its social ecology have largely sunk into the cattle-trampled mud of the Oxfordshire Cotswolds.
Now Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton has revived memories. Why couldn’t he have called himself Lord Cameron of Hook Norton, or of Blairmore (as Garter might have suggested), the house in Aberdeenshire built by his great-great-grandfather?
The Chipping Norton set were, according to an opinion piece in this newspaper in 2011, “louche, affluent, power-hungry and amoral Londoners”. Hold on! Louche affluence is no sin in Oxfordshire. But it was being called Londoners that stung. Not many Londoners keep horses. Round Chipping Norton the fields are thick with them.
One horse was called Raisa, which reached the ripe equestrian age of 24 by the end of her life in 2010. Perhaps she was named after Mrs Gorbachev, internationally prominent when she (the horse) was foaled. Anyway, Raisa was owned by the Metropolitan Police, and she was kindly looked after in old age by Rebekah Brooks, a newspaper executive. Mrs Brooks was married to the affable Charlie Brooks, a racehorse trainer who used to write columns in this newspaper about badgers. The prime minister (Gordon Brown) was at their wedding.
The Brookses and Jeremy Clarkson (a local TV farmer, in those days more celebrated as a TV petrol-head) and the Camerons and people less famous knew each other. David Cameron rode Raisa at least once. Jeremy Clarkson has said of the Brookses: “They actually met over supper in our house one night and are the most fantastically kind and generous people we know.”
But like Lord Roberts’s verdict on the Cliveden Set, this has not dispelled memories of a police inquiry linked to phone hacking. Rebekah and Charlie Brooks were tried and found not guilty.
I don’t want to rake over all that. But even without my wanting to, the phrase Chipping Norton Set ignited a train of associations slumbering in my memory. Chipping Norton might acquire new associations from Lord Cameron dashing dashingly round the world, provoking outbreaks of peace or sending guns if not gunboats. Cliveden’s appeasement vibes were overlaid with sex-scandal associations with the Profumo affair of the 1960s. Yet now it is a blameless hotel.
There is a hotel in Chipping Norton High Street. Who knows, it might one day change its name to the Cameron Arms. Garter should be consulted about the correct details of the arms.
