Rob Blackhurst

Financial Times, May 2008

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Tory intellectual, man of letters and novelist – bemoans his "fatal inclination to take the detour". But it is this circumlocutory path from his origins as the son of a gentleman Steeplechase Jockey without any visible means of support – through Sixties Oxford, Old Fleet Street, and Margaret Thatcher's policy unit – that make this such a compelling collection of vignettes. The only disappointment is that his stint as editor of the Times Literary Supplement is missing from these pages.

Mount's achievements themselves are less impressive than his knack for hovering, pen in hand, as a never-ending waltz of famous figures flit through. They stretch over a century from Lawrence of Arabia (who lunched with his mother) to Jeffrey Archer (who provided unfunny – and rejected- jokes for Thatcher's speeches). Here Mount has picked up on the rhythms examined by his Uncle, Anthony Powell, in his epic sequence A Dance to the Music of Time.

Mount's novelist's eye gives Cold Cream a - a gauzy texture – just like the "swimmy fragrance of gin and cigarettes and flowers" that he remembers from boyhood. This bleariness comes from the odd, circular narrative. Mount's own memories of taking tea Siegfried Sassoon and being bandaged by Celia Johnson are mixed with tales from his mother's life as a Bright Young Thing in thirties Oxford. Cambridge Spy Donald Maclean accompanies her on a skiing trip, the Mitford girls, inevitably, make a cameo appearance, and Isaiah Berlin writes her love letters in the early hours.

Though Mount's parents live in what he calls "Hobohemia" – a "raffish subdivision of the upper class which, like some rare butterfly, was to be found only on the Wiltshire Downs", the most powerful part of Cold Cream charts the conventional British brutalities of public schools and parental separation. When he is sixteen, Mount learns that his mother has died of cancer by Telegram, and bitterly regrets that his final letter to her is full of "preening hypochondria and callous self-absorption". This feeling returns at Oxford when a house-mate uses Mount's hunting gun to kill himself – without him realising that the man was at all depressed.

As an Old-Etonian Baronet, Mount should have been classic Tory wet material. But, unlike much of the squireachy, he found Thatcher's moral certainties thrilling. His account of running the Downing Street Policy Unit are short on new revelations but rich in untold comic moment, with Thatcher cast as a Woodhousian Aunt. At one point she halts a meeting after detecting evidence that Ferdy has a cold, totally ignores his pleas that he is in fine health, and rushes up two flights of stairs to the Downing Street flat to force him to take pills that he doesn't need. Thatcher's mythology of surviving on a few hours sleep is wryly debunked at Chequers when he witnesses her sneaking off to bed – once her guests are safely in their rooms- after telling them that she will be working through the night.

The overwhelming impression of Cold Cream is of an establishment that is still thriving – of politicians still from the same tight network of families that have been breeding them for a century. While Mount is in Downing Street, his Cousin's "pink and perky" son, harbouring political ambitions, has the chutzpah to ring up the Number Ten switchboard and organise a visit. That guest turns out to be David Cameron. And so the waltz continues.