British Conservative Party Leader David Cameron leaves his home in London, on May 11, 2010.LEON NEAL
The Conservative Party that David Cameron inherited in 2005 was a disoriented shadow of its once mighty self, riven by ideological disarray, wounded by endless power struggles and facing the bleak prospect of long-term unelectability.
As leader, the smooth, self-assured Mr. Cameron, who became Britain's new Prime Minister Tuesday, moved swiftly to weed out the old guard, replacing the party's mean-spirited image with a kinder, more socially progressive philosophy that he called compassionate Conservatism. That he succeeded is a reflection of his toughness, acumen and resolve.
"One thing [Mr.]Cameron does have is flexibility," said Peter Snowdon, author of Back From the Brink: The Inside Story of the Tory Resurrection.
David William Donald Cameron was born Oct. 9, 1966. Likable, quick on his feet, informal, self-assured, his easy charm a vivid contrast to the tortured, self-lacerating intensity of former prime minister Gordon Brown, Mr. Cameron seemed at times to be gliding into power, so effortlessly did he take to the cut-and-thrust of British parliamentary politics.
The third of four children, Mr. Cameron had a privileged childhood in a small Berkshire village. His father, Ian, a stockbroker and the chairman of the London gentlemen's club Whites, met personal adversity - badly deformed legs that have since been amputated - with old-fashioned British perseverance.
During the campaign, he played down his background, as well as that of his wife, Samantha, whose father is a baronet and whose stepfather is a viscount. They have two young children - a son, Ivan, was severely disabled and died last year - and are expecting another child in the fall. By all accounts, Mr. Cameron is a hands-on father and was so distraught about six-year-old Ivan's death that he considered leaving politics.
When he was 21, Mr. Cameron began a series of political jobs with the Conservative Party, starting in its research department. He first ran for Parliament in 1997. He lost, but was elected four years later, to the safely Conservative seat of Witney in Oxfordshire. Even as the Tories floundered, unable to re-create the glory years of the Thatcher era and losing election after election, Mr. Cameron rose through the party ranks. But it was a huge surprise when he was elected leader - the fourth in eighth years - on a program of party detoxification, as some called it.
He has been accused of having an autocratic style and of limiting his decision-making to a small circle of advisers, many of them old friends, such as George Osborne, who in opposition was the shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer.
But Anthony Seldon, a political biographer and the master of Wellington College, said of Mr. Cameron:
"He's been very impressive in the election campaign, in quite an unexpected way. He hasn't tried to be what he's not. He speaks to a country as it is at the moment, when it needs to recover its belief in politics."