David Cameron (prime minister of United Kingdom)

Table of Contents

David Cameron, in full David William Donald Cameron (born October 9, 1966, London, England), British Conservative Party leader who served as prime minister of the United Kingdom (2010– ).

Early life and start in politics

Cameron, a descendant of King William IV, was born into a family with both wealth and an aristocratic pedigree. He attended Eton College and Brasenose College, Oxford, from which he graduated (1988) with a first-class degree in philosophy, politics, and economics. After Oxford he joined the Conservative Party Research Department. In 1992 he became a special adviser to Norman Lamont, then chancellor of the Exchequer, and the following year he undertook the same role for Michael Howard, then home secretary. Cameron joined the media company Carlton Communications in 1994 as director of corporate affairs. He stayed at Carlton until he entered Parliament in 2001 as MP for Witney, northwest of London.

Cameron—young, moderate, and charismatic—quickly attracted attention as the leading member of a new generation of Conservatives. He was widely compared to Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair, who had acquired a similar reputation when he entered Parliament 18 years earlier. After just two years as an MP, Cameron was appointed to his party’s “front bench”—making him a leading Conservative spokesman in the House of Commons. In 2004 Howard, by then party leader, appointed his young protégé to the post of head of policy coordination, which put Cameron in charge of preparing the Conservatives’ 2005 election manifesto. The party, however, suffered a heavy defeat at the polls, provoking Howard’s resignation. Cameron’s self-assured speech at the party’s annual conference in October 2005 transformed his reputation, and he was subsequently elected Conservative leader.

Cameron’s revitalization of the Conservatives

Cameron sought to modernize the party and shed its right-wing image. He announced that economic stability and strong public services would take priority over tax cuts in the next Conservative government. Under his leadership the party grew in popularity and placed first in the 2006 local elections; it was the Conservatives’ best showing at the polls in some 15 years.

In the immediate aftermath of Gordon Brown’s succeeding Blair as Labour leader and prime minister in 2007, the Conservatives began to trail in the polls, encouraging the prime minister to consider calling a snap election to capitalize on Labour’s momentum. By the time Labour held its party conference in September, it had taken a double-digit lead over the Conservatives. But, at the Conservative Party conference in early October, Cameron made an impressive speech, talking for more than an hour without a script. In reference to the upcoming European Union summit in Lisbon to negotiate a treaty on reform, Cameron lambasted Brown for ruling out a referendum on an agreement (contrary to the prime minister’s commitment to hold one on a European constitution). In addition to other issues, Cameron also was critical of Labour’s performance on crime and with regard to the National Health Service (NHS). Most daringly, despite trailing in the polls, he goaded the prime minister to call an election:

So, Mr Brown, what’s it going to be? Why don’t you go ahead and call that election? Let the people pass judgement on 10 years of broken promises. Let people decide who’s really making the arguments about the future of our country. Let people decide who can make the changes that we really need in our country. Call that election. We will fight. Britain will win.

The performance won wide praise, and in its aftermath Brown announced that there would be no general election before 2009. Later that month, after Brown had attended the EU summit in Lisbon, at which the 27 member countries agreed on the detailed wording of the treaty, Cameron followed up with his earlier criticism, arguing that Brown had “absolutely no democratic mandate to sign this without a referendum.” By December the Conservatives had taken a clear lead in the opinion polls, ahead of Labour by up to 13 percent—the biggest lead for the Conservatives since 1989.

The global economic crisis in 2008 helped Cameron solidify the Conservatives’ position. Though Brown was widely praised outside of Britain for his approach to the crisis, his promise in 1997 that the days of economic “boom and bust” were over played to Cameron’s advantage, as did an internal revolt by Labour ministers in 2008. In March 2009 Cameron made good on a promise to remove the Conservatives from the European People’s Party, a mainstream alliance of conservative parties in the European Parliament. On June 4 the Conservatives topped the poll in the European Parliament elections, and Cameron had the Conservatives enter the legislative body as members of the European Conservatives and Reformists Group.

A parliamentary-expenses scandal, which had been brewing since 2007, broke in May 2009 when the Daily Telegraph reported on widespread abuse by members of Parliament of expense accounts meant to offset the cost of having to maintain a second residence (the so-called Additional Costs Allowance). The scandal cut across party lines, but Labour suffered the brunt of public criticism, and Cameron responded by arguing that the public had a “right to be angry.” Although the polling numbers for Cameron and the Conservatives showed a decline from peaks in early 2009, he and the party appeared to be well positioned for the general election on May 6, 2010.

Prime ministership

The Conservative–Liberal Democratic coalition government

Voters gave the Conservatives their biggest seat gain since 1931, but the total still fell short of an outright majority. Days of political wrangling followed the election, with negotiators from the Conservative and Labour parties courting Liberal Democratic leader Nick Clegg in an effort to form a government. On May 11, after it appeared that the prospect of a “Lib-Lab” coalition would not bear fruit, Brown resigned as prime minister and was replaced by Cameron. He came to power at the head of a Conservative–Liberal Democratic coalition government—Britain’s first coalition government since World War II—in which Clegg became deputy prime minister. The two leaders seemed to quickly become comfortable with each other, perhaps because of their shared age (both were 43) and similar backgrounds.

In June Cameron addressed Parliament in response to the report of Lord Saville’s 12-year official inquiry into the events of “Bloody Sunday,” which found that British soldiers had been responsible for the deaths of 14 nationalist demonstrators in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, in 1972 and that those demonstrators had posed no serious threat to the soldiers. “The government is ultimately responsible for the conduct of the forces,” Cameron said, “and for that, on behalf of the government—indeed, on behalf of our country—I am deeply sorry.”

One of the cornerstones of the Conservative-Liberal power-sharing agreement was a pledge to formulate a budget-reduction plan in short order. In October the man whom Cameron had appointed chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, announced a five-year austerity plan that included Britain’s most extensive spending cuts in decades, notably reductions to welfare entitlements and layoffs of up to 500,000 public-sector employees.

Early in 2011 the Middle East and North Africa were swept by a series of popular uprisings that became known as the Arab Spring. In February Cameron became the first Western leader to visit Egypt after Hosni Mubarak was ousted from power. Another event in the region, the revolt in Libya, particularly captured the attention of Cameron, who became an outspoken critic of ruler Muammar al-Qaddafi’s brutal repression of the rebels in Libya. Cameron’s calls for military intervention in that country and especially for the imposition of a no-fly zone to protect Libyan civilians from Qaddafi’s forces were echoed by French Pres. Nicolas Sarkozy. Together they played a pivotal role in winning the UN Security Council’s authorization of a no-fly zone on March 17. Shortly thereafter a coalition of U.S. and European forces with warplanes and cruise missiles began attacking targets in Libya in an effort to disable Libya’s air force.

The results of the May 2011 local government elections in Britain, especially those for local councils in England, appeared to indicate that Conservative voters were more comfortable than Liberal Democrats with the deficit-reducing austerity measures introduced by the government. The Conservatives made moderate gains to their presence in local government, but their coalition partners experienced their worst performance at the polls since the founding of the Liberal Democrats. In the wake of the election, relations between Cameron and Clegg and their parties were widely described as having become more businesslike in nature. This cooling of coalition camaraderie was largely the result of the Conservatives’ active opposition to a Liberal Democrats-initiated referendum on a change from first-past-the-post elections to the alternative vote, which was strongly rejected by British voters.

Following the Scottish Nationalist Party’s overwhelming victory in the 2011 elections for the Scottish Parliament, Alex Salmond, the first minister of Scotland, announced that he would be forwarding a referendum on independence. Cameron announced that he would respect Scotland’s efforts in that direction but would “campaign to keep our United Kingdom together with every single fibre that I have.”

When the scandal involving the illegal hacking of telephone voice mails by reporters from the News of the World newspaper exploded in July 2011, Cameron was caught in the fallout. Andy Coulson, Cameron’s communications chief, had already left that post in January of the same year in the wake of the growing evidence tying him to the scandal. Coulson had served as the editor of News of the World from 2003 to 2007, when he stepped down after early revelations of the phone hacking came to light. Initially, Cameron had been supportive of Coulson after he left his government post, but, as the scandal deepened in July, Cameron said that he regretted having hired Coulson. Cameron announced on July 13 that a senior judge, Lord Justice Sir Brian Leveson, would head a public inquiry into both the hacking scandal and Britain’s system of media regulation.

In early August 2011 Cameron faced a new challenge, as a profusion of neighbourhoods in and around London as well as in a number of other British cities erupted in riots characterized by widespread looting, arson, and destruction of property. The civil disorder was sparked on the night of August 6 when a protest in the North London area of Tottenham over the police shooting of a young man escalated into rioting, which began spreading the next day. “This is criminality pure and simple, and it has to be confronted and defeated,” announced Cameron on August 9 as some 16,000 policemen prepared to take to the streets of London that night. Cameron also called members of Parliament back to London for discussion of the riots. In a speech on August 15, Cameron blamed “a broken society” for a “slow-motion moral collapse.” In a separate statement he promised tougher measures, especially against people living in rented social housing in the event that any member of the family broke the law.

The Cameron government’s first major social innovation started to bear fruit in September 2011 with the opening of the first 24 “Free Schools,” which were free to students and funded by the government but able to operate independently of local councils. The government enacted another major change in October at a meeting of Commonwealth leaders in Australia, where it was agreed that the British crown could pass to the firstborn child, regardless of sex, and that the ban, more than 300 years old, on a British monarch’s marrying a Roman Catholic was no longer valid. Also in October, the retirement age was set to rise to 66 by 2020 for public-sector workers, and mandatory retirement was lifted. In December Cameron took the nearly unprecedented step of vetoing a proposal supported by the other 26 EU heads of government to amend the EU’s rules to reduce the risks of future financial crisis in the euro zone. It was the first major proposal rejected by Britain since it joined the European Community.