David Cameron (born 9 October 1966) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 11 May 2010 to 13 July 2016, succeeding Gordon Brown and preceding Theresa May. Cameron, a Conservative politician, branded himself as a liberal-conservative due to his support for social liberalism and economic liberalism; he privatized key industries and pursued an interventionist foreign policy while legalizing same-sex marriage and modernizing his old party. He resigned in 2016 following the success of the Brexit referendum, which he had opposed.
Biography[]
David Cameron was born in Marylebone, Greater London, England on 9 October 1966 to an upper-upper-middle class family. His father's family originated in Scotland, and his mother was maternally Welsh; he was also of English and very distant German-Jewish ancestry. Cameron attended Eton College, where he was disciplined for smoking marijuana. He left Eton in 1984 and worked as a researcher for his godfather, the Conservative MP Tim Rathbone, during his nine-month gap year. While attending the University of Oxford, he adopted moderate conservative views, and he graduated in 1988. Cameron worked with the Conservative Research Department and worked as a strategist for Prime Minister John Major, and he later became a special adviser to the treasurer and home secretary before working as Director of Corporate Affairs at Carlton Communications. On 7 June 2001, he was elected to Parliament for Witney, succeeding Shaun Woodward; he would remain MP until 12 September 2016, when Robert Courts succeeded him.
In 2005, after Conservative leader Michael Howard stepped down following the UK Labor Party's victory in the general elections, Cameron announced his candidacy for leader. His colleagues Boris Johnson, George Osborne, Michael Ancram, Oliver Letwin, and William Hague supported him, and he vowed to make people feel good about being Conservatives again, saying that he wanted to switch the party to a new generation. Cameron was elected by his party, but many people unfavorably compared his youth and inexperience to that of the former prime minister Tony Blair, a Labour politician. In 2010, the Conservatives won the general election, defeating Gordon Brown's Labour Party, and Cameron became the new Prime Minister.
At age 43, Cameron became the United Kingdom's youngest prime minister since Robert Jenkinson in 1812. Cameron set about reacting to the Great Recession with deficit reduction; he protected the National Health Service and education from budget cuts, and he decreased government spending. Cameron supported limiting immigration from outside the European Union, but his efforts were useless, as immigration actually increased in 2015. Cameron also pursued an interventionist foreign policy, supporting the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi by sending Royal Air Force planes to bomb Libyan government forces; he also sent weapons to Saudi Arabia during the Yemeni Civil War and criticized Israel's transformation of the Gaza Strip into a "prison camp". In 2014, he gained parliamentary approval to bomb the Islamic State in Iraq, but not to bomb them in Syria; he was the first Prime Minister to have such a foreign policy reverse since 1782. On 3 December 2015, in the aftermath of the November 2015 Paris attacks, Parliament voted to expand the air campaign into Syria.
In 2016, Cameron carried out his promise to hold a referendum on whether the United Kingdom should remain a part of the European Union, and he campaigned for Britain to remain within a "reformed EU". On 24 June 2016, after the referendum resulted in a victory for the "leave" campaign, Cameron announced his resignation as Prime Minister, as he did not want to lead the country in a new direction. Cameron had been a controversial figure for both the left and right; he was deemed "too conservative" by the left for his privatizations and for his foreign policy, while the right claimed that he was "not conservative enough" due to his social liberal stances. Nevertheless, he succeeded in modernizing his party, and apologizing for Margaret Thatcher's discriminatory policies during the 1980s.