David Cameron
David William Donald Cameron, Baron Cameron of Chipping Norton, is a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2010 to 2016. Until 2015, he led the first coalition government in the UK since 1945 and resigned after a referendum supported the country's leaving the European Union. After his premiership, he served as Foreign Secretary in the government of prime minister Rishi Sunak from 2023 to 2024. Cameron was Leader of the Conservative Party from 2005 to 2016 and served as Leader of the Opposition from 2005 to 2010. He was Member of Parliament for Witney from 2001 to 2016, and has been a member of the House of Lords since November 2023. Cameron 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 Eton College and Brasenose College, Oxford. After becoming an MP in 2001, he served in the opposition Shadow Cabinet under Conservative leader Michael Howard, and succeeded Howard in 2005. 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 effects of the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession, which his government sought to address 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 attempted to enforce stricter immigration policies via the Home Office hostile environment policy, introduced reforms to education, and oversaw the 2012 London Olympics. Cameron's administration privatised Royal Mail and some other state assets, implemented the Equality Act, and legalised same-sex marriage in England and Wales. Internationally, Cameron oversaw Operation Ellamy in the First Libyan Civil War and authorised the bombing of the Islamic State in Syria. Constitutionally, his government oversaw the 2011 United Kingdom Alternative Vote referendum 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 majority government, Cameron introduced the Brexit referendum on the UK's continuing membership of the European Union in 2016. He supported the Britain Stronger in Europe campaign which lost. Following the success of Vote Leave, Cameron resigned as prime minister and was succeeded by Theresa May, his home secretary.
Cameron resigned his seat on 12 September 2016, and maintained a low political profile. He has served as the president of Alzheimer's Research UK from 2017 to 2023, and returned in 2025; and was implicated in the Greensill scandal. Cameron released his memoir, For the Record, in 2019. In 2023 he was appointed foreign secretary by Rishi Sunak and became a life peer as Baron Cameron of Chipping Norton. After the Conservatives lost the 2024 general election to the Labour Party, Cameron retired as foreign secretary. However, he maintains his House of Lords seat.
Cameron was credited for helping to modernise the Conservative Party, and for reducing the UK's national deficit. However, he was subject to criticism for austerity measures, as well as his decision to hold a referendum on Britain's membership of the EU, which led to political instability in the UK during the late 2010s. In historical rankings of prime ministers of the United Kingdom, academics and journalists have ranked him in the fourth and third quintiles.
Early life and education
Early family life
David William Donald Cameron was born on 9 October 1966 at the London Clinic in Marylebone, London, and raised at Peasemore in Berkshire. He has two sisters and an elder brother, Alexander Cameron. Cameron is the younger son of Ian Donald Cameron, a stockbroker, and his wife Mary Fleur, a retired Justice of the Peace and the daughter of Sir William Mount, 2nd Baronet. He is also a descendant of William IV through one of the king's illegitimate children.Cameron's father was born at Blairmore House near Huntly, Aberdeenshire, and died near Toulon, France, on 8 September 2010; Blairmore was built by Cameron's great-great-grandfather, Alexander Geddes, who had made a fortune in the grain trade in Chicago, United States, 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
Cameron was educated at two private schools. From the age of seven, he was taught at Heatherdown School in Winkfield, Berkshire. 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".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 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 Cameron, 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".
At Oxford Cameron become a member of the controveral Bullingdon Club, an exclusive all-male dining society for Oxford University's students with a reputation for elitism, and a culture of excessive drinking associated with boisterous behaviour and damaging property. In his 2019 memoir For the Record, Cameron wrote about being a member of the Bullingdon, his regret for having joined 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..." and: "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 docudrama, When Boris Met Dave, the title referring to Boris Johnson, another high-profile Conservative Party figure, the then-mayor of London, who had been a member at the same time, and who would go on to be prime minister himself.
Cameron graduated in 1988 with a first-class BA degree.
Early political career
Conservative Research Department
After graduation, Cameron worked for the Conservative Research Department between September 1988 and 1993. His first brief was Trade and Industry, Energy and Privatisation; he befriended fellow young colleagues, including Edward Llewellyn, Ed Vaizey and Rachel Whetstone. They and others formed a group they called the "Smith Square set", which was dubbed the "Brat Pack" by the press, though it is better known as the "Notting Hill set", a name given to it pejoratively by Derek Conway. In 1991 Cameron was seconded to Downing Street to work on briefing John Major for the then twice-weekly sessions of Prime Minister's Questions. One newspaper gave Cameron the credit for "sharper ... Despatch box performances" by Major, which included highlighting for Major "a dreadful piece of doublespeak" by Tony Blair over the effect of a national minimum wage. He became head of the political section of the Conservative Research Department, and in August 1991 was tipped to follow Judith Chaplin as political secretary to the prime minister.Cameron lost to Jonathan Hill, who was appointed in March 1992. Instead, he was given the responsibility for briefing Major for his press conferences during the 1992 general election. During the campaign, Cameron was one of the young "brat pack" of party strategists who worked between 12 and 20 hours a day, sleeping in the house of Alan Duncan in Gayfere Street, Westminster, which had been Major's campaign headquarters during his bid for the Conservative leadership. Cameron headed the economic section. It was while working on this campaign that Cameron first worked closely with and befriended Steve Hilton, who was later to become Director of Strategy during his party leadership. The strain of getting up at 04:45 every day was reported to have led Cameron to decide to leave politics in favour of journalism.