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By Brian Donaldson

WHEN it comes to speech-making, Jonny Sweet's first words on winning the Edinburgh Comedy Award's Best Newcomer prize weren't exactly Obama-like. "Oh, that's mental," came shooting from his mouth before the usual practice of forgetting to thank enough of the right people and looking fairly keen to get off the stage.

"I had tried to tell myself that if I did win, I should try to be really suave and cool and give out some pithy epigrams," recalls the 24-year-old alumni of Cambridge Footlights, who scooped the award in August this year for his one-man show, Mostly About Arthur. "I was quite embarrassed by my hair as well as what I said."

Since nothing that happened on that podium could be remotely described as statesman-like, some delicious ironies must have been rattling around Sweet's mind. As well as his award-winning hour, he was also playing a stiff political idealist in Tom Basden's play Party, while a month earlier he had been filming the part of the young David Cameron for More4's When Boris Met Dave. The drama-documentary, directed by John Dower and co-produced by Toby Young, is a snapshot of the late 1980s life of the current mayor of London and the man whom many believe is destined for No 10. Johnson and Cameron were both members of the Bullingdon Club, a Tory enclave at Oxford notorious for eating in nice restaurants which they would subsequently wreck, before leaving a blank cheque to pay for the damage.

The whole concept of such a film - as well as its transmission slap-bang in the middle of the Conservative Party conference - has inevitably got a Tory or two hot under their blue collars. Phillip Davies, MP for Shipley in Yorkshire, has muttered sinisterly about Channel 4 being open to "accusations they are pursuing an agenda". In the past, Johnson (played by Christian Brassington who, curiously, took the central role in Channel 4's Tony Blair: Rock Star) has spoken of his Bullingdon days as full of "dark deeds involving plastic cones and letterboxes", while recalling one incident where he was "crawling through hedges trying to escape police dogs".

Cameron has been less vocal about his involvement with the club, which Sweet puts down to a simple fact. "It seems that he was quite removed from all that and would sneak off home early," he says. "He was apparently incredibly normal and likeable and had loads of good-looking girlfriends and watched quiz shows all day, which sounds quite cool." Although Cameron wasn't especially politically active at Oxford, there is a sense that he still had his eyes fixed firmly on the prize. Sweet says: "He just knew that he had an entitlement to it because of his family connections; there's a bit in the film when Cameron is about to leave university and the Queen's Equerry, whatever that is, rings up Conservative head office and says, 'give David a job' and they're, 'yip, sure'."

Cameron's lack of destructive tendencies at Oxford (his political enemies will argue that he's been saving all that up for the day he steps into Downing Street) meant that, for Sweet, there was a serious downside to such a plum role. "The initiation to get into the club was that you got your room trashed but, annoyingly, because Cameron wouldn't do any of that, I was just standing there while everyone is having a good time. But there's one point where I couldn't take it any longer and really just kicked in this cupboard; it got too much. Legally, they couldn't put in every last rumour or detail, some of which are really quite startling, so it's amazing that what you see is the thin end of the wedge."

Sweet's rise to portraying the PM-in-waiting was just as eye-opening an event to the newspapers that announced the news back in July. Back then, his face would have been known only to TV obsessives who had taken an inordinate interest in BBC3 pilots, while his most prominent role to date was in one episode of E4's scatological teen-boy caper Inbetweeners. But to live comedy-watchers, he has been a promising act who, alongside Inbetweeners stars and fellow ex-Footlighters Joe Thomas and Simon Bird, has made some waves in the past four Edinburgh Fringes.

Sweet was born in Nottingham in 1985 to a solicitor father and teacher mother, when Margaret Thatcher was two years into her second term as prime minister. He recalls being woken by his father on the morning of 2 May, 1997. "He was kneeling before my bed as though it was a big day, which it was, telling me that Tony Blair had got into power. I was 12, so most of my adult life has been Labour; it's quite strange that this is probably about to change."

Sweet was not driven to acting at school, but appeared in one play. "I was pretty bad, very much the red-faced, shivering p**** in the corner."

It was only at Cambridge, where he met Joe Thomas, that the performing bug snapped on to him. He and Thomas quickly became Footlights staples, venturing up to Edinburgh to play in front of packed crowds but generally antagonistic critical opinion. "Usually, everyone in Footlights is sour and bitter by the end of Edinburgh, because everyone hates them and tells them that Fry and Laurie were the last good thing to come out of it. So, you'd just get reviews that pretty much said 'these posh p****s doing this piece of s*** show' and going on about how posh we were and how wrong and evil it was that people from Cambridge were doing comedy."

Sweet once hoped to pursue a career in publishing, an ambition he was able to plunder for his one-man Fringe debut, in which he wrote and performed an hour about his dead brother Arthur, a renowned blurbist of such books as The Furtive Fork and Guantanamo Gay. Though Arthur was wholly fictional, Sweet's actual brother was less enamoured by his younger sibling's intentions.

"When I told him I was doing a show about my dead brother, he was really not happy. And then when I asked if I could get a photo of him to be used for Arthur, he stared at me with these incredibly intimidating eyes and said 'absolutely not'."

At least the judges at Edinburgh were distinctly more appreciative of his show, which was rammed full of inventive multi-media ideas and a bit of awkward audience interaction, all delivered in the mildly unsettling, quite posh persona that has served him so well on comedy platforms. And now that persona is being made to fit neatly into the shape of the Tories' great white hope.

"I did an audition as though I was being interviewed to get into Oxford and at no point did they tell me that it was for David Cameron; all they said was that they wanted an Etonian with an aspiration of politics. It was quite weird, because I didn't know whether I was meant to be funny or not."

Clearly having convinced another set of judges that he was primed for this role, Sweet was left with only one nagging doubt. "My main concern is that it might make the Tories look a bit like rock stars and kind of cool," he says. "My dad would be so devastated if I was in any way responsible for them getting back into government."

Both Jonny Sweet and the country might be in for a rude awakening come 2010.

• When Boris Met Dave is on More4 at 9pm tomorrow.

POLITICIANS ON THE SCREEN

MICHAEL SHEEN AS TONY BLAIR

For a little while, it looked as if Michael Sheen was going to make a career out of impersonating Tony Blair on screen, playing him in both The Deal (2003) and The Queen (2006). Watch both to see the way Sheen develops the "character". The Blair of The Queen - a prime minister rather than an ambitious leader-in-waiting - is more statesmanlike, the nervy tics and quirks more restrained, although still oddly boyish.

ANTHONY HOPKINS AS RICHARD NIXON

A peculiar casting choice on first glance, Hopkins gives a barnstorming performance as the disgraced US president in Oliver Stone's 1995 biopic, Nixon - one that Stone's long, slightly unfocused film itself never quite lives up to.

JOSH BROLIN AS GEORGE W BUSH

Josh Brolin's portrayal of the most unpopular US president since Nixon - in Oliver Stone's 2008 movie W - feels a little cartoonish at first, but overall it's a rewardingly nuanced performance, in a film that is subtler, and less damning, than many anticipated.

LINDSAY DUNCAN AS MARGARET THATCHER

No fan of Thatcher (how many actors are, though?) Lindsay Duncan gives an empathetic performance as the Iron Lady in the BBC's recent drama about her last days in power.