The United Kingdom has a new prime minister, David Cameron. Here we profile the nation's youngest leader in almost 200 years.
David Cameron was blessed, or cursed, with the tag of future Conservative leader almost as soon as he set foot in the House of Commons in 2001. Nobody imagined it would take only four years.
He was still a rank outsider when he launched his leadership bid in 2005. Starting with only a handful of supporters, though with the tacit backing of his predecessor Michael Howard, he built up a powerful campaign, attracting many of the younger MPs and also a wide cross-section of the parliamentary party.
Presenting himself as the modernisers candidate, a centrist with a conscience, he called for radical change in the Party, which he said needed to “think, look and feel and sound like a completely different organisation”. He praised Tony Blair for transforming his Party, and set about doing the same for the Conservatives immediately after his runaway victory.
A fluent if not sensational speaker, he wowed the party conference with a well-rehearsed bravura performance without notes, seen in contrast to a pedestrian speech from the front-runner David Davis. He still came second in the first ballot among MPs, but the elimination of Kenneth Clarke swelled his supporters from the left, and he easily overtook Davis in the second.
He handled the ensuing election among Party members cleverly, refusing to be specific about policy and concentrating on a new image for the Party. He didn’t always win the debates with Davis, but he won the election by more than two to one.
He has espoused many traditional Tory views, such as low taxes and a strong emphasis on the family. But he immediately set about moving his Party to the centre ground. He changed the candidate selection system to favour women and ethnic minorities, emphasised world poverty and the environment as key issues, cycled to work and ditched several commitments of the 2005 manifesto that he had helped draft. He made it clear there was more to come.
A leading member of the so-called Notting Hill group of younger Tories, he is one of a dozen Etonians remaining in the House of Commons, most of whom are now in his frontbench team. He also has the classic, almost too classic, pedigree of the traditional Tory leader, with added modernity and youthful good looks.
His reshuffle after his election embraced almost every strand of thinking in the Party, skilfully appointing people in accordance with their own enthusiasms and keeping potential critics on board. He brought back William Hague as Shadow Foreign Secretary, and three years later Ken Clarke as Shadow Business Secretary. He found policy review jobs for senior colleagues such as John Redwood and Iain Duncan Smith.
Dave Cameron, as he now became, was born in 1966, son of an estate agent and stockbroker and the descendant on his mother’s side of several Tory MPs.
He was academically undistinguished at school. But after a gap year working for a Tory MP and travelling to the Far East, he flourished at Brasenose College, Oxford under Professor Vernon Bogdanor, who said he was one of the ablest students he had taught.
He stayed clear of student politics, was a member of the Bullingdon Club, famous for its drunken revels, but still took first-class honours in philosophy, politics and economics.
He then graduated to the political school of hard knocks. He was a special adviser to Michael Howard as Home Secretary and survived “Black Wednesday” as adviser to Norman Lamont as Chancellor of the Exchequer.
He worked for the Conservative Research Department for four years as head of the political section, helped to brief both Margaret Thatcher and John Major for Prime Minister’s Questions, and was part of the Tory general election team in 1992. He worked for Michael Howard at the Home Office.
He left full-time politics for a while to be head of corporate affairs for Carlton Communications plc. His boss Michael Green predicted a glittering career in business, but he was determined to return to politics. But he was not universally admired by business journalists, some of whom described him as “slippery”, “poisonous” and “dissembling”.
His return hit a setback. He stood for the notionally Conservative new seat of Stafford in 1997, where he lost to Labour's David Kidney by 4,314 on a swing of nearly 11 per cent.
He then landed safely in Douglas Hurd's old seat of Witney when Hurd's successor Shaun Woodward defected to Labour in 1999 and to St Helens South in 2001.
He made an amusing maiden speech in which he teased the "nouveau riche" Woodward, and soon made his name as a frequent contributor to debates, especially on rural affairs and foot-and-mouth disease.
He served on the Home Affairs Select Committee and the Committee for Modernisation of the Commons. He worked on Conservative Policy Committees and all-party groups on public service broadcasting and drugs misuse.
He was first appointed to the Opposition front bench in 2003 as Deputy Shadow Leader of the Commons. The next new leader Michael Howard made him one of two Deputy Chairmen of the Party, and in March 2004 he returned to the front bench in the local government team, with special responsibility for finance.
In June 2004, in the wake of the UKIP’s inroads into the Tory vote in the European elections, he was appointed policy co-ordinator, replacing David Willetts. Three months later Howard brought him into an expanded Shadow Cabinet as spokesman on Local and Devolved Government Affairs, to prepare for the general election. He was responsible for the slimmed-down 2005 Manifesto, which attracted some criticism. He later accepted some responsibility for the failures of the election campaign.
His appointment as Shadow Education Secretary in 2005 gave him a platform to prove himself to a party desperate for a new image.
His wife Samantha, reputedly descended from Charles II’s mistress Nell Gwynne, is the daughter of a Lincolnshire landowner and stepdaughter of Viscount Astor, a Tory spokesman in the Lords. Their first child Ivan was born severely disabled with epilepsy and cerebral palsy and died in February 2009 at the age of six. They have a daughter and a second son, born in 2006.
He is an ardent campaigner for children with special needs, and one of his roles has been Shadow Minister for the Disabled.
He helped to devise the scheme for the extension of CCTV cameras through the country, and was reported as favouring more tagging of criminals, and for "difficult children" to be taken on by the armed services.
He claims to hate the characterisation of himself and his even younger friend and Shadow Chancellor George Osborne as the “Blair and Brown” of the Conservative Party. Mr Osborne ruled himself out of the leadership race early on, to head the Cameron campaign, but no receipts for meals for two in Notting Hill restaurants have yet come to light.
He is a member of the National Farmers Union, and lists his recreations as tennis, bridge and cooking.
He has undoubtedly given the Tory Party a new lease of life and a confidence notably lacking for a decade or more.
And he has now taken the party in to power, after thirteen years.
Profile supplied by Dods People.
