British Conservative candidate works to overcome his posh background

Reporting from Peasemore, England —  The man who may be Britain’s next leader grew up in a spacious country home in this village of thatched roofs, green fields and classic red phone boxes, playing tennis on the family court and joining the occasional foxhunt.

He got his university degree from Oxford, where he belonged to an exclusive club of young men with a reputation for wearing tails and drinking to excess.

His closest political ally is the son of a baronet, and Queen Elizabeth is a distant cousin.

David Cameron, 43, who first won public office just nine years ago, is a strong contender to become the first Conservative prime minister since 1997 when Britons go to the polls May 6. Out on the campaign trail, he cheerfully promises to usher in a modern, compassionate conservatism that will help Britons help themselves.

What Cameron can’t help, though, is his privileged upbringing — and the fact that, even in 21st century Britain, after the free-market revolution of Margaret Thatcher and the “Cool Britannia” of Tony Blair, questions of class still infuse this society like tea in water.

That’s one reason why Liam Didsbury can’t imagine voting Conservative, no matter how hard Cameron may try to downplay his past and sell himself as an ordinary bloke.

“ British people don’t like to see posh people pretend not to be who they are,” said Didsbury, a Labor Party supporter in the northern English working-class town of Rochdale.

Didsbury described Cameron as a blue-blooded Tory “who’s been to Eton” — Britain’s toniest prep school — and “went to Oxford.”

And not just him. His “front bench,” the fellow Tories who would form his Cabinet if Cameron becomes prime minister, is stacked with other privately educated individuals from wealthy, even aristocratic, backgrounds.

Such facts don’t go unnoticed here, even if class divisions aren’t as rigid as they once were in a nation still peopled with dukes, earls, countesses, knights and dames. Experts say class remains one of the strongest determinants of how voters cast their ballots, an enduring force never far below the surface of the British psyche.

That explains why Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the Labor Party, who is trailing badly in the polls, trumpets himself as a product and champion of the middle class. And why Nick Clegg, the head of the Liberal Democrats, a smaller party that has recently surged in popularity, skates lightly over his education at an expensive prep school and Cambridge.

The preoccupation with class turned a spoof “campaign poster” of Brown challenging Cameron to “step outside, posh boy,” into an instant hit. (The Guardian newspaper gag also poked fun at Brown’s alleged anger-management issues.) Another takeoff paired Cameron’s tanned and smiling face with the statement, “Some of my best friends are poor.”

Cameron makes no apology for his background and denies that it’s any handicap to his electability.

“The British public are totally beyond that. They think what matters is where you’re going to, not where you come from,” he told the Financial Times. “They also think that this sort of class-war politics is completely outdated, divisive and wrong.”

When pressed by another interviewer to say whether he was middle or upper class, Cameron chose neither, tactfully calling himself “well-off” instead.

On the stump, he projects a casual, sleeves-rolled-up, can-do air. He likes being called “Dave,” or so he tells supporters in the rounded, well-bred tones of someone brought up in the affluent “home counties” of southern England.

But his attempts to come across as more of a regular chap have been undermined by some missteps.

Cameron famously described his wife, Samantha, the daughter of Sir Reginald Adrian Berkeley Sheffield, 8th Baronet, as “unconventional” because she didn’t attend boarding school. His much-publicized willingness to bike to work at the House of Commons also seemed a little less down-home when a photographer shot his chauffeured limousine carrying his briefcase behind him.

“The problem isn’t Cameron’s extreme privilege — it is that he has never tried to see beyond it,” Johann Hari of the Independent newspaper wrote recently. “He keeps accidentally revealing how warped his view of Britain is, and how little of it he understands.”

Cameron also hasn’t been helped by some of his colleagues in his effort to dispel the Conservatives’ image as a ruling class bonded by a sense of entitlement and a shared antipathy toward the lower orders.

There was Nicholas Winterton, a longtime Tory lawmaker, who shuddered that a crackdown on parliamentary expenses meant having to swap first-class train travel for standard class, whose clientele were a “totally different type of people.”

Or Douglas Hogg, another Tory member of Parliament (and 3rd Viscount Hailsham), who got taxpayers to foot the bill to clear out the moat on his country estate.

And Annunziata Rees-Mogg, a young parliamentary candidate, who brushed off a gentle suggestion from Cameron that she change her upper-crust-sounding name to the more plebeian Nancy Mogg.

Thankfully, though, Richard Grosvenor Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax is running for Parliament as plain “Richard Drax” in the county of Dorset, where he lives in a stately home that has served as the family seat since Elizabethan times. He, too, insists his background is no problem: “It is what is in your soul that counts.”

Cameron’s childhood home is modest by comparison here in Peasemore, a sleepy village in the Royal County of Berkshire (royal because it’s home to Windsor Castle). But that’s only by comparison: The house, known as the Old Rectory, is approached by a long drive, sits on sprawling grounds and boasts several chimneys.

He grew up here with a brother, two sisters, their mother and their father, who comes from a long line of stockbrokers. Though well-heeled, his family gave him a grounded view of life, he says.

“My parents were very responsible people who drummed it into us at an early age that we were lucky … and we should make the best of what we have, that we have obligations to other people, that we were part of something bigger than ourselves,” he said in a recent television interview.

At Eton, the storied prep school that has produced 18 prime ministers, Cameron performed well enough on his college-entrance exams to win admission to Oxford, where he graduated with top honors with a degree in philosophy, politics and economics. There, he belonged to the elite Bullingdon Club, along with Boris Johnson, the badly coiffed but highly entertaining Tory mayor of London.

When he ran for the party leadership in 2005, after the Conservatives’ third consecutive election loss to Labor, Cameron initially had little support among his fellow members of Parliament or name recognition among the wider public. But a strong performance at the Tories’ party conference helped land him the job.

On the hustings, he presents a picture of youthful vigor. He is said to have called himself the “heir to Blair,” who was also only 43 upon becoming prime minister and who, despite heading the Labor Party, was also educated at an exclusive private school and Oxford.

A telegenic speaker and skillful debater, Cameron once mocked Brown, 59, as “an analog politician in a digital age.” Brown, in turn, scornfully described some Tory policies as dreamed up “on the playing fields of Eton,” a comment Cameron complained was “petty” and “spiteful.”

After watching a big lead in the polls shrink substantially in recent weeks, Cameron is now trying to exploit exhaustion and anger with Brown’s Labor Party and to beat back the surprising surge of the Liberal Democrats. Though not expected to win outright, the Liberal Democrats could play kingmaker and join Labor in a coalition government.

Cameron’s campaign stops have been carefully chosen to show himself and his party in a populist light that’s almost literally the opposite of their champagne-and-caviar reputation: Recent photo ops have featured him in a London brewery and a discount supermarket.

An appearance in a bread factory was rather less successful when Cameron admitted that he had recently bought a bread maker — workers hissed — and then joked lamely about not knowing how to use it properly.

“The best thing since sliced bread?” The Times of London asked on its front page, over a photo of Cameron in front of a mountain of freshly sliced loaves.

The paper added: “Not everyone is convinced.”

henry.chu@latimes.com

Janet Stobart in The Times’ London Bureau contributed to this report.