Giles Andreae - Writer and artist, creator of 'Purple Ronnie’, and a friend since childhood
We spent the summer before last with him and his family for a week in Cornwall. I’d forgotten how much energy he had, to the extent that he decided that he and I should do three fairly hardcore activities every single day and he wasn’t satisfied until we did. When I’m on holiday, I quite like to relax and soak up the sunshine, read a book, play with my children. David would get up, decide that we needed to go for a run on the beach for an hour, come back and have breakfast and then decide that we’d go surfing before lunch and then come back and put a kayak on the roof and kayak for miles in the afternoon, every day.
He’s always been confident – in a good way – of his own ability, which is great. It really aggravates me when you read in the press that he is too cocky, I personally want a prime minister who is confident with his decisions.
If you look at his family, you can see how his politics stem directly, in my view, from his upbringing. At the centre of his family is a great deal of trust. I think if you look at his politics at the moment, it is all about trusting people to know that they will do what’s right for themselves and their society. He talks about devolving power back to the people and that is directly, I think, because he has been given a great deal of trust and authority from a young age.
As a friend, he has been amazing for me. Again it’s an example of his kindness and his concern for people which has been very publicly analysed over the whole issue of Ivan and how they dealt with his condition and treatment. I lived with him in Oxford when we were undergraduates and I had cancer at the time and had to have very extensive chemotherapy and radiotherapy in the local hospital. My parents lived in Dorset and his lived near Newbury and he would frequently come with me to the hospital and pick me up and drive me back to his parents’ house, make sure I was comfortable in bed, made sure I had loads of videos and food, told his mum what I liked and would leave his parents’ house, drive back to Oxford and revise for his exams, all in his last term of finals.