David Cameron is a British former politician who previously served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2010 to 2016 and Leader of the Conservative Party from 2005 to 2016. He previously served as Leader of the Opposition from 2005 to 2010, and was Member of Parliament (MP) for Witney from 2001 to 2016. He identifies as a one-nation conservative, and has been associated with both economically liberal and socially liberal policies.

Born in London to an upper-middle-class family, Cameron was educated at Heatherdown School, Eton College, and Brasenose College, Oxford. From 1988 to 1993 he worked at the Conservative Research Department, latterly assisting the Conservative Prime Minister John Major, before leaving politics to work for Carlton Communications in 1994. Becoming an MP in 2001, he served in the opposition shadow cabinet under Conservative leader Michael Howard, and succeeded Howard in 2005. Cameron sought to rebrand the Conservatives, embracing an increasingly socially liberal position, and introducing the "A-List" to increase the number of female and minority ethnic Conservative MPs.

Following the 2010 general election, negotiations led to Cameron becoming prime minister as the head of a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats. His premiership was marked by the ongoing effects of the global financial crisis; these involved a large deficit in government finances that his government sought to reduce through austerity measures. His administration passed the Health and Social Care Act and the Welfare Reform Act, which introduced large-scale changes to healthcare and welfare. It also enforced stricter immigration policies, introduced reforms to education and oversaw the 2012 London Olympics. It privatised the Royal Mail and some other state assets, and legalised same-sex marriage in England and Wales.

Internationally, Cameron's government intervened militarily in the First Libyan Civil War and authorised the bombing of the Islamic State. Domestically, his government oversaw the referendum on voting reform and Scottish independence referendum, both of which confirmed Cameron's favoured outcome. When the Conservatives secured an unexpected majority in the 2015 general election, he remained as prime minister, this time leading a Conservative-only government. To fulfil a manifesto pledge, Cameron introduced a referendum on the UK's continuing membership of the EU in 2016. He supported the Britain Stronger in Europe campaign for the UK to remain in the European Union. Following the success of the Leave vote, Cameron resigned as prime minister and was succeeded by Theresa May, his home secretary. He has been the president of Alzheimer's Research UK since 2017.

Cameron has been praised for modernising the Conservative Party and for decreasing the United Kingdom's national deficit. However, he has been criticised for his decision to hold the referendum on Britain's membership of the EU, which led to political instability in the UK during the late 2010s. After leaving office, he was implicated in the Greensill scandal after lobbying government ministers and civil servants on behalf of Greensill Capital.

Early Life and Career

Early family life

David William Donald Cameron was born on 9 October 1966 in Marylebone, London, and raised at Peasemore in Berkshire. His siblings comprise of two sisters and an elder brother, Alexander Cameron KC (1963–2023), a barrister, who died of cancer. He is the younger son of Ian Donald Cameron (1932–2010) a stockbroker, and his wife Mary Fleur, a retired Justice of the Peace and a daughter of Sir William Mount, 2nd Baronet.

Cameron's father, Ian, was born at Blairmore House near Huntly, Aberdeenshire, and died near Toulon, France, on 8 September 2010; Ian was born with both legs deformed, and underwent repeated operations to correct this. Blairmore was built by Cameron's great-great-grandfather, Alexander Geddes, who had made a fortune in the grain trade in Chicago, Illinois, before returning to Scotland in the 1880s. Blairmore was sold soon after Ian's birth.

Cameron has said, “On my mother's side of the family, her mother was a Llewellyn, so Welsh. I'm a real mixture of Scottish, Welsh, and English.” He has also referenced the German Jewish ancestry of one of his great-grandfathers, Arthur Levita, a descendant of the Yiddish author Elia Levita.

Education

From the age of seven, Cameron was educated at two private schools: at Heatherdown School in Winkfield (near Ascot) in Berkshire, which counts Prince Andrew and Prince Edward among its old boys. Owing to good grades, he entered its top academic class almost two years early. At the age of 13 he went on to Eton College in Berkshire, following his father and elder brother. His early interest was in art. Six weeks before taking his O-Levels, he was caught smoking cannabis. He admitted the offence and had not been involved in selling drugs, so he was not expelled; instead he was fined, prevented from leaving the school grounds, and given a "Georgic" (a punishment that involved copying 500 lines of Latin text).

Cameron passed twelve O-Levels and then three A-levels: History of art; History, in which he was taught by Michael Kidson; and Economics with Politics. He obtained three 'A' grades and a '1' grade in the Scholarship Level exam in Economics and Politics. The following autumn, he passed the entrance exam for the University of Oxford, and was offered an exhibition at Brasenose College.

After leaving Eton in 1984, Cameron started a nine-month gap year. For three months he worked as a researcher for his godfather Tim Rathbone, then Conservative MP for Lewes, during which time he attended debates in the House of Commons. Through his father, he was then employed for a further three months in Hong Kong by Jardine Matheson as a 'ship jumper', an administrative post.

Returning from Hong Kong, Cameron visited the then-Soviet Union, where he was approached by two Russian men speaking fluent English. He was later told by one of his professors that it was "definitely an attempt" by the KGB to recruit him.

In October 1985, Cameron began his Bachelor of Arts course in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at Brasenose College, Oxford. His tutor, Vernon Bogdanor, has described him as "one of the ablest" students he has taught, with "moderate and sensible Conservative" political views.

Guy Spier, who shared tutorials with him, remembers him as an outstanding student: “We were doing our best to grasp basic economic concepts. David—there was nobody else who came even close. He would be integrating them with the way the British political system is put together. He could have lectured me on it, and I would have sat there and taken notes.” When commenting in 2006 on his former pupil's ideas about a "Bill of Rights" to replace the Human Rights Act, however, Bogdanor, himself a Liberal Democrat, said, "I think he is very confused. I've read his speech and it's filled with contradictions. There are one or two good things in it but one glimpses them, as it were, through a mist of misunderstanding".

While at Oxford, Cameron was a member of the Bullingdon Club, an exclusive student dining society that has a reputation for an outlandish drinking culture associated with boisterous behaviour and damaging property. In his 2019 memoir Cameron wrote about being a member of the Bullingdon and its impact on his political career, saying: "When I look now at the much-reproduced photograph taken of our group of appallingly over-self-confident ‘sons of privilege’, I cringe. If I had known at the time the grief I would get for that picture, of course I would never have joined. But life isn't like that...“These were also the years after the ITV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited when quite a few of us were carried away by the fantasy of an Evelyn Waugh-like Oxford existence. Cameron's period in the Bullingdon Club was examined in a 2009 Channel 4 docu-drama, When Boris Met Dave, the title referring to Boris Johnson, another high-profile Conservative party figure, who was then Mayor of London at the time of the film had been a member at the same time and who would go on to be Prime Minister himself years later.

Cameron graduated in 1988 with a first-class honours BA degree (later promoted to an MA by seniority)

Prime Minister (2010-2016)

On 11 May 2010, following the resignation of Gordon Brown as prime minister and on his recommendation, Queen Elizabeth II invited Cameron to form a new administration. At age 43, Cameron became the youngest prime minister since Lord Liverpool in 1812, beating the record previously set by Tony Blair in May 1997. In his first address outside 10 Downing Street, he announced his intention to form a coalition government, the first since the Second World War, with the Liberal Democrats.

Cameron outlined how he intended to “put aside party differences and work hard for the common good and for the national interest.” As one of his first moves Cameron appointed Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, as deputy prime minister on 11 May 2010. Between them, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats controlled 363 seats in the House of Commons, with a majority of 76 seats.

In June 2010 Cameron described the economic situation as he came to power as "even worse than we thought" and warned of "difficult decisions" to be made over spending cuts. By the beginning of 2015 he was able to claim that his government's austerity programme had succeeded in halving the budget deficit, although as a percentage of GDP rather than in cash terms.

In December 2010, Cameron attended a meeting with FIFA vice-president Chung Mong-joon in which a vote-trading deal for the right to host the 2018 World Cup in England was discussed.

Cameron agreed to holding the 2014 Scottish independence referendum and eliminated the "devomax" option from the ballot for a straight out yes or no vote. His support for the successful Better Together campaign extended to making a successful request to the Queen to intervene. He had also backed a successful campaign to retain the status quo in a referendum on changing the voting system held at the request of his coalition partners. The 2016 referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union meant that his tenure as British prime minister saw an unprecedented three referendums on the UK's constitutional future.

He supported the introduction of gay marriage despite more of his own Conservative MPs voting against the move than for it, meaning the support of Lib Dem MPs in government and Labour MPs in opposition was required to allow it to pass.

Earlier in his term he had managed to secure a huge majority for UK participation in UN-backed military action in Libya, but Cameron became the first prime minister since 1782 to lose a foreign policy vote in the House of Commons over proposed military action against Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria. Subsequently, Barack Obama asked congressional approval, which was not ultimately granted.

In Popular Culture

Cameron made a cameo appearance in the BBC television programme Top Gear's India Special, where he tells the trio of Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond to "stay away from India" after initially denying the group's request to improve economic relations with India in a letter and suggested that they mend fences with Mexico. Cameron later stated through his aides that he did not like the special that he cameoed in, and that he had the "utmost respect" for the people of India.

Cameron had a cameo in a One Direction video as part of the 2013 Comic Relief.

Cameron was portrayed by comedian Jon Culshaw in ITV's satirical sketch show Newzoids.

Cameron was portrayed by Mark Dexter in the Channel 4 television films Coalition and Brexit: The Uncivil War.

Cameron was interviewed for a BBC mini-documentary series on his Premiership in 2019, The Cameron Years.