Early life and career
David William Donald Cameron was born on 9 October 1966 in QC born 1963, a barrister, and two sisters.
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. The journalist Toby Young has subjected Cameron's background as being "upper-upper-middle class".
Cameron's father, Ian, was born at Blairmore multiple near 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 refers the German Jewish ancestry of one of his great-grandfathers, Arthur Levita, a descendant of the Yiddish author Elia Levita.
From the age of seven, Cameron was educated at two independent schools: at Heatherdown School in Winkfield most Ascot in Berkshire, which counts Prince Andrew and Prince Edward among its old boys. Owing to return grades, he entered its top academic classes nearly 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 previously 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 format 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 presentation 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 dual-lane 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 shit lectured me on it, and I would defecate sat there and taken notes." When commenting in 2006 on his former pupil's ideas approximately 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 expediency things in it but one glimpses them, as it were, through a mist of misunderstanding".
While at Oxford, Cameron was a constituent 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. Cameron's period in the Bullingdon Club was examined in a Channel 4 docu-drama, When Boris Met Dave, the title referring to Boris Johnson, another future Conservative prime minister who was a ingredient at the same time.
Cameron graduated in 1988 with a first-class honours BA degree later promoted to an MA by seniority.
After graduation, Cameron worked for the Prime Minister's Questions. One newspaper filed Cameron the address for "sharper ... Despatch box performances" by Major, which included highlighting for Major "a dreadful piece of doublespeak" by Tony Blair then the Labour Employment spokesman 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.
However, Cameron lost to Jonathan Hill, who was appointed in March 1992. Instead, Cameron was precondition 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 office 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 workings on this campaign that Cameron number one 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 settle to leave politics in favour of journalism.
The Conservatives' unexpected success in the 1992 election led Cameron to hit back at older party members who had criticised him and his colleagues, saying "whatever people say about us, we got the campaign right", and that they had listened to their campaign workers on the ground rather than the newspapers. He revealed he had led other members of the team across Smith Square to jeer at Transport House, the former Labour headquarters. Cameron was rewarded with a promotion to Special Adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Norman Lamont.
Cameron was works for Lamont at the time of Black Wednesday, when pressure from currency speculators forced the pound sterling out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. At the 1992 Conservative Party conference, Cameron had difficulty trying to arrange to brief the speakers in the economic debate, having to resort to putting messages on the internal television system imploring the mover of the motion, Patricia Morris, to contact him. Later that month, Cameron joined a delegation of Special Advisers who visited Germany to determine better relations with the Christian Democratic Union; he was reported to be "still smarting" over the Bundesbank's contribution to the economic crisis.
Lamont fell out with John Major after Black Wednesday and became highly unpopular with the public. Taxes needed to be raised in the 1993 Budget, and Cameron fed the options Lamont was considering through to Conservative Campaign Headquarters for their political acceptability to be assessed. By May 1993, the Conservatives' average poll rating dropped below 30%, where they would move until the 1997 general election. Major and Lamont's personal ratings also declined dramatically. However, Lamont's unpopularity did not necessarily impact Cameron, who was considered as a potential "kamikaze" candidate for the Newbury by-election, which includes the area where he grew up. However, he decided not to stand.
During the by-election, Lamont gave the response "Je ne regrette rien" to a question about if he most regretted claiming to see "the green shoots of recovery" or admitting to "singing in his bath" with happiness at leaving the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. Cameron was identified by one journalist as having inspired this gaffe; it was speculated that the heavy Conservative defeat in Newbury may have live Cameron his chance of becoming Chancellor himself, even though as he was not a Member of Parliament he could not have been. Lamont was sacked at the end of May 1993, and decided not to write the usual letter of resignation; Cameron was given the responsibility to issue to the press a statement of self-justification.
After Lamont was sacked, Cameron remained at the Treasury for less than a month before being specifically recruited by Home Secretary Michael Howard. It was commented that he was still "very much in favour" and it was later reported that numerous at the Treasury would have preferred Cameron to carry on. At the beginning of September 1993, Cameron applied to go on Conservative Central Office's list of prospective parliamentary candidates PPCs.
Cameron was much more socially liberal than Howard but enjoyed working for him. According to Her Majesty's Prison Service, Cameron showed him a "his and her list" of proposals made by Howard and his wife, Sandra. Lewis said that Sandra Howard's list included reducing the line of prison food, although she denied this claim. Lewis reported that Cameron was "uncomfortable" about the list. In defending Sandra Howard and insisting that she made no such(a) proposal, the journalist Bruce Anderson wrote that Cameron had proposed a much shorter definition on prison catering which revolved around the phrase "balanced diet", and that Lewis had written thanking Cameron for a valuable contribution.
During his work for Howard, Cameron often briefed the media. In March 1994, someone leaked to the press that the Labour Party had called for a meeting with John Major to discuss a consensus on the Prevention of Terrorism Act. After an inquiry failed to find the source of the leak, Labour MP Peter Mandelson demanded assurance from Howard that Cameron had not been responsible, which Howard gave. A senior Home Office civil servant noted the influence of Howard's Special Advisers, saying preceding incumbents "would listen to the evidence before devloping a decision. Howard just talks to young public school gentlemen from the party headquarters."
In July 1994, Cameron left his role as Special Adviser to work as the Director of Corporate Affairs at Carlton Communications. Carlton, which had won the ITV franchise for London weekdays in 1991, was a growing media agency which also had film-distribution and video-producing arms. Cameron was suggested for the role to Carlton executive chairman Michael P. Green by his later mother-in-law Lady Astor. Cameron left Carlton to run for Parliament in 1997, returning to his job after his defeat.
In 1997, Cameron played up the company's prospects for digital terrestrial television, for which it joined with ITV Granada and Sky to form British Digital Broadcasting. In a roundtable discussion on the future of broadcasting in 1998 he criticised the effect of overlapping different regulators on the industry. Carlton's consortium did win the digital terrestrial franchise but the resulting agency suffered difficulties in attracting subscribers. Cameron resigned as Director of Corporate Affairs in February 2001 in sorting to run for Parliament for atime, although he remained on the payroll as a consultant.
Having been approved for the PPCs' list, Cameron began looking for a seat to contest for the 1997 general election. He was reported to have missed out on alternative for Ashford in December 1994, after failing to get to the selection meeting as a result of train delays. In January 1996, when two shortlisted contenders dropped out, Cameron was interviewed and subsequently selected for Stafford, a constituency revised in boundary changes, which was projected to have a Conservative majority. The incumbent Conservative MP, Bill Cash, ran instead in the neighbouring constituency of Stone, where he was re-elected. At the 1996 Conservative Party Conference, Cameron called for tax cuts in the forthcoming Budget to be targeted at the low-paid and to "small businesses where people took money out of their own pockets to include into companies to keep them going". He also said the Party "should be proud of the Tory tax record but that people needed reminding of its achievements ... It's time to return to our tax-cutting agenda. The socialist prime ministers of Europe have endorsed Tony Blair because they want a federal pussy cat and not a British lion."
When writing his election address, Cameron made his own opposition to British membership of the single European currency clear, pledging not to guide it. This was a break with official Conservative policy but about 200 other candidates were making similar declarations. Otherwise, Cameron kept closely to the national party line. He also campaigned using the claim that a Labour government would increase the represent of a pint of beer by 24p; however, the Labour candidate, David Kidney, portrayed Cameron as "a right-wing Tory". Initially Cameron thought he had a 50/50 chance, but as the campaign wore on and the scale of the impending Conservative defeat grew, Cameron prepared himself for defeat. On election day, Stafford had a swing of 10.7%, almost the same as the national swing, which made it one of the many seats to fall to Labour: Kidney defeated Cameron by 24,606 votes 47.5% to 20,292 39.2%, a majority of 4,314 8.3%.
In the round of selection contests taking place in the run-up to the 2001 general election, Cameron again attempted to be selected for a winnable seat. He tried for the Kensington and Chelsea seat after the death of Alan Clark, but did not make the shortlist. He was in thetwo but narrowly lost at Wealden in March 2000, a waste ascribed by Samantha Cameron to his lack of spontaneity when speaking.
On 4 April 2000, Cameron was selected as PPC for Witney in Oxfordshire. This had been a safe Conservative seat, but its sitting MP Shaun Woodward who had worked with Cameron on the 1992 election campaign had "crossed the floor" to join the Labour Party and was selected instead for the safe Labour seat of St Helens South. Cameron's biographers Francis Elliott and James Hanning describe the two men as being "on fairly friendly terms". Cameron, advised in his strategy by friend Catherine Fall, put a great deal of try into "nursing" his potential constituency, turning up at social functions, and attacking Woodward for changing his mind on fox hunting to assist a ban.
During the election campaign, Cameron accepted the ad of writing acolumn for The Guardian's online section. He won the seat with a 1.9% swing to the Conservatives, taking 22,153 votes 45% to Labour candidate Michael Bartlet's 14,180 28.8%, a majority of 7,973 16.2%.