口譯點滴積累之：英國新任首相卡梅倫

發布時間：2010-05-12

作者：顧微

來源于：昂立外語網站

紐約時報的一篇介紹卡梅倫的文章，和大家分享一下。

卡梅倫和布朗的對比

David William Donald Cameron was born Oct. 9, 1966, which makes him, at 43, the youngest prime minister since the 2nd Earl of Liverpool ran the government in the early 19th century. Likable, quick on his feet（迅速拿定主意）, informal, self-assured（自信的）, his easy charm a vivid contrast to the tortured（飽受煎熬）, self-lacerating（自我批評） intensity of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Mr. Cameron seemed at times to be gliding into power（輕松獲得權位）, so effortlessly did he take to the cut-and-thrust （激烈交鋒）of British parliamentary politics.

卡梅倫和父親

The third of four children, Mr. Cameron had a privileged childhood（幸運的童年） in a small Berkshire village. His father, Ian, a stockbroker and the chairman of the London gentlemen’s club Whites, met personal adversity — badly deformed legs that have since been amputated（截肢） — with old-fashioned British perseverance（毅力）.

“My father always used to say that nothing in life is fair, but both he and Mum were very much of the view that you had to muck in （合作，分享）and get on with things and deal with the difficult stuff that comes your way,” Mr. Cameron told The Daily Telegraph recently.

卡梅倫的求學之路

When he was 7, Mr. Cameron was sent to Heatherdown, a prep school whose alumni（校友） include Princes Andrew and Edward, and whose attitudes toward class were clear: on field day（學校運動會）, the portable bathrooms were designated Ladies, Gentlemen and Chauffeurs（富人或要人的司機）. (When Mrs. Thatcher was elected prime minister, the school celebrated with an impromptu student-staff cricket match.) Mr. Cameron then went to Eton（一頓公學，有“紳士搖籃”之稱）, the traditional finishing school（精修學校） for Britain’s ruling classes, where it was reported that, as punishment for getting caught smoking marijuana, he was made to copy 500 lines of Latin text. At Oxford, he was a member of the notorious Bullingdon Club, whose agenda consisted of getting dressed up, getting drunk and getting out of trouble by paying off the people whose things were destroyed in club bacchanalias.

卡梅倫和孩子

During the campaign, he played down（淡化） his background, as well as that of his wife, Samantha, whose father is a baronet （準男爵）and whose stepfather is a viscount（子爵）. They have two young children — a son, Ivan, was severely disabled and died last year — and are expecting another child in the fall. By all accounts, Mr. Cameron is a hands-on (親手實踐的) father and was so distraught （心急如焚的）at 6-year-old Ivan’s death that he considered leaving politics. （好父親）

卡梅倫的政治生涯

When he was 21, Mr. Cameron began a series of political jobs with the Conservative Party, starting in its research department. He then spent several years working as head of corporate affairs for Carlton Communications, a media company.

He first ran for（競選） Parliament in 1997. He lost, but was elected four years later, to the safely Conservative seat of Witney in Oxfordshire. Even as the Tories floundered on, unable to recreate the glory years of the Thatcher era and losing election after election, Mr. Cameron rose through the party ranks. But it was a huge surprise when he was elected leader — the fourth in eight years — on a program of party detoxification；as some called it.

Amid grumbling from old-school Tories（英國保守黨黨員）, Mr. Cameron aggressively sought to bring more women and minorities into the party and into Parliament. He promoted environmental issues and spoke out in favor of gay rights and civil partnerships.

He has been accused of having an autocratic（獨裁的，專斷的） style. and of limiting his decision-making to a small circle of advisers, many of them old friends, like George Osborne, who in opposition was the shadow chancellor of the Exchequer（英國財政部）.

Mr. Cameron provoked anger from Tory old-timers by publicly rebuking（指責，批評） the party grandees （大人物）caught in last year’s scandal over parliamentary expenses — the ones who charged taxpayers for items like buying manure, getting moats cleaned and fixing swimming pools (many of those particular legislators were successfully dissuaded, by Mr. Cameron, from seeking re-election).

The big idea of his campaign was something he called the big society, the notion that rather than depending on government to provide their needs, people should look to community and volunteer organizations.

But his party squandered a huge lead in the polls that would have produced a large parliamentary majority. That they failed to win a larger share of the vote in the end reflects in part the electorate’s confusion about what the Conservatives, and their leader, really stand for, and in part people’s fears that they have not changed as much as Mr. Cameron says they have.

But Anthony Seldon, a political biographer and the master of Wellington College, said he admired Mr. Cameron’s approach.

“He’s been very impressive in the election campaign, in quite an unexpected way,” Mr. Seldon said. “He hasn’t tried to be what he’s not. He speaks to a country as it is at the moment, when it needs to recover its belief in politics.”

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