Just who is David Davis?

[shewhomust]

For the benefit of those of us who thought David Davis was Ray's less talented brother, yesterday's Guardian devotes the first six and a half pages of its G2 section to a profile of this contender for the leadership of the Tory party.

Its length is not the only odd thing about it.
"By the end of his first year [at university], besides single-handedly establishing Radio Warwick..." - quite an achievement for a first year: not impossible, but unlikely.

Ceaselessly, he encouraged his daughters' academic work, moving to Croydon to be close to a better state school, and teaching them to ski, scuba-dive and rock-climb. His ambition was rewarded when both daughters won places at Oxbridge.

There's something about that unspecific "Oxbridge"; if it's worth telling us about the skiing, scuba-diving and rock-climbing (which are not, presumably, the subject of the academic work we are told he encouraged), isn't it worth naming the colleges, or at least specifying the universities, to which his unnamed daughters won admission? I can think of many possible explanations for this vagueness (including protecting the privacy of women who are not, themselves, seeking public office); but the resultant text reads as if it had been written by an alien.

After winning his parliamentary seat in Yorkshire:

[Davis] undertook what was to become an annual pilgrimage: a 192-mile walk from Bees Head in the Lake District to Robin Hood's Bay in North Yorkshire.

This is not some bizarre feat of his own devising, this is Alfred Wainwright's Coast to Coast Walk.

One last oddity is the claim that Davis's background was in left-wing politics, because:

...his grandfather Walter Harrison (his mother's stepfather) had been a shop steward and a communist agitator who had led the Jarrow march from York to Aldermaston.

The Grauniad cannot take all the credit for this interesting glitch: its first appearance (on the web, at least) is the May 15th entry in a David Davis for leader blog, which did at least restrict its claim to leadership to "the leg from York to Aldermaston". Back in June, the Times Online was using the same terminology as the Guardian: "Walter Harrison, a Communist who led the 1936 Jarrow hunger march from York to Aldermaston..."
Davis's grandfather may have led the Jarrow Crusade from York to Aldermaston - Google finds no evidence of this that does not come from Davis himself, but Google doesn't know everything^* - but the marchers did not follow him there: they continued, as planned, to London, to lobby parliament. The Aldermaston marches were something entirely different.

My first reaction was that the article reads as if it had been written by an alien; on reflection, it reads as if it had been written by Jeffrey Archer.

^*His grandfather can't have been Wal Hannington, can he?

Comments

[samarcand.livejournal.com]

Oh. THAT David Davis. Of course. Silly me.

[durham-rambler.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure where this "single-handedly establishing Radio Warwick" came from, because if you listen to an interview he gave to Radio Warwick (mp3 file) on 4 May, David Davis freely says it was set up by "a chap called Ian Black and myself" and that "it was Ian's idea really". So while he clearly and plausibly claims a major role in setting up the station (which is a student station, still broadcasting today, see www.radio.warwick.ac.uk), I wonder how much of that article came from the interview with Davis and how much from uncritical internet searches and material from his campaign?