David William Donald Cameron

David William Donald Cameron ;(/ˈkæmᵊrən/; born 9 October 1966) is a British politician. Cameron has served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom since 2010, and as Member of Parliament for Witney since 2001. The Leader of the Conservative Party since 2005, Cameron identifies as a One-Nation Conservative, and has been associated with both economically liberal and socially liberal policies. After the referendum on leaving the European Union, Cameron announced that he would leave office by October 2016 (after a new Party leader is elected).

Born in London to wealthy upper middle-class parents, Cameron was educated at Heatherdown School, Eton College, and Brasenose College, Oxford. From 1988 to 1993 he worked at the Conservative Research Department, 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, succeeding Howard in 2005. Cameron sought to rebrand the Conservatives, embracing an increasingly socially liberal position. The 2010 general election led to Cameron becoming Prime Minister as the head of a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats.[1] His premiership was marked by the ongoing effects of the late-2000s financial crisis; these involved a large deficit in government finances that his government sought to reduce through austerity measures. His administration introduced large-scale changes to welfare, immigration policy, education, and healthcare.[2] It privatised state assets like the Royal Mail and legalised same-sex marriage.

Internationally, his government militarily intervened in the Libyan Civil War and later authorised the bombing of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant; 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 a majority in the 2015 general election, he remained as Prime Minister leading a Conservative government. To fulfil a manifesto pledge, he introduced a referendum on the UK's continuing membership of the EU. Cameron supported continued membership; following the success of the "Leave" vote,[3] he announced that he would step down before the October 2016 Conservative Party conference to make way for a new Prime Minister.[3][4]

Cameron has been praised for modernising the Conservative Party and for reining in the United Kingdom's national debt. Conversely he has been criticised by figures on both the left and right, accused of political opportunism and social elitism. Cameron has appeared on the Forbes List of The World's Most Powerful People since 2010
    Family
 See also: Family of David Cameron and Samantha Cameron
Cameron is the younger son of Ian Donald Cameron (1932–2010), a stockbroker, and his wife Mary Fleur, née Mount (born 1934),[6] a retired Justice of the Peace and a daughter of Sir William Mount, 2nd Baronet.[7] Cameron's parents were married on 20 October 1962.[6] The journalist Toby Young has described Cameron's background as being "upper-upper-middle class".[8]

Cameron was born in Marylebone, London,[9] and raised in Peasemore, Berkshire.[10] He has a brother, Alexander Cameron, QC (born 1963), a barrister,[11] and two sisters, Tania Rachel (born 1965) and Clare Louise (born 1971).[6][12]

His father, Ian, was born at Blairmore House near Huntly, Aberdeenshire, and died near Toulon, France, on 8 September 2010;[13] Ian was born with both legs deformed and underwent repeated operations to correct them. Blairmore was built by Cameron's great-great-grandfather, Alexander Geddes,[14] who had made a fortune in the grain trade in Chicago, Illinois, before returning to Scotland in the 1880s.[15]

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."[16] 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 independent schools: at Heatherdown School in Winkfield (near Ascot) in Berkshire, which counts Prince Andrew and Prince Edward among its old boys. Due to good grades, Cameron entered its top academic class almost two years early.[19] At the age of thirteen, he went on to Eton College in Berkshire, following his father and elder brother.[20] His early interest was in art. Six weeks before taking his O-Levels he was caught smoking cannabis.[21] He admitted the offence and had not been involved in selling drugs, so he was not expelled, but was fined, prevented from leaving the school grounds, and given a "Georgic" (a punishment which involved copying 500 lines of Latin text).[22]


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.[23] The following autumn he passed the entrance exam for the University of Oxford, and was offered an exhibition at Brasenose College