Cameron studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at Oxford, gaining a first class honours degree. He then joined the Conservative Research Department and became Special Adviser to Norman Lamont, and then to Michael Howard. He was Director of Corporate Affairs at Carlton Communications for seven years.
He was defeated in his first candidacy for Parliament at Stafford in 1997, but was elected in 2001 as the Member of Parliament for the Oxfordshire constituency of Witney. He was promoted to the Opposition front bench two years later, and rose rapidly to become head of policy co-ordination during the 2005 general election campaign. With a public image of a young, moderate candidate who would appeal to young voters, he won the Conservative leadership election in 2005.
In the 2010 general election held on 6 May, the Conservatives won 307 seats in a hung parliament. After five days of intense negotiations, Cameron formed a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. The 43-year-old Cameron became the youngest British Prime Minister since the Earl of Liverpool 198 years earlier.Cameron leads the first coalition government of the United Kingdom since the Second World War.
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.
Meltdown
His efforts to change the party must have been helped by his own background and experience working within Conservative HQ during their last spell in power.
Mr Cameron worked at the Conservative Research Department after leaving Oxford, briefing John Major for prime minister's questions and, famously, accompanying Chancellor Norman Lamont on Black Wednesday, as the pound crashed out of the exchange rate mechanism.
He then spent seven years as the head of public relations at commercial broadcaster Carlton, all the while attempting to become an MP himself, something he achieved in 2001, when he won the safe Conservative seat of Witney.
Mr Cameron was by now a married man with a family. His wife, Samantha, daughter of landowner Sir Reginald Sheffield, runs an upmarket stationery company.
They have two young children, Nancy and Arthur with another baby due in September.
Electrifying
Their first child, Ivan, who was born profoundly disabled and needed round the clock care, died in February 2009.
The experience of caring for Ivan and witnessing at first hand the dedication of NHS hospital staff, is said by friends to have broadened Mr Cameron's horizons, from the apparently charmed life he had led to this point.
He had been talent spotted by Michael Howard in the mid-1990s, but when he entered the race to succeed Mr Howard as party leader in 2005 few gave the young education spokesman who had only recently become an MP a chance.
It took an electrifying conference speech, delivered without notes, in what would become his trademark style, to change the minds of the party faithful.
A few may have had second thoughts, when in the early months of his leadership he spoke about how some young offenders just needed love (caricatured by his opponents as his "hug a hoodie" speech) and was pictured with huskies in the Arctic Circle on a trip to investigate climate change.
Tough times
At the start of his leadership, Mr Cameron was all about sunny optimism and "sharing the proceeds of growth". His aim was to decontaminate the Tory brand and get rid of its "nasty party" image.
He ordered the party to end its obsession with Europe and tried to reposition it as the party of the environment and the NHS, as well as recruiting more women and candidates from ethnic minorities to winnable seats.
He also cannily used the expenses scandal that rocked Westminster to portray himself as a radical reformer bent on cleaning up politics.
He was helped in his mission by many older, more traditionally-minded Tory MPs being forced to retire to make way for young Notting Hill Tories - as Mr Cameron's fashionable, Metropolitan supporters came to be called.
He was rewarded with big poll leads - but the financial crisis forced Mr Cameron to ditch much of his upbeat rhetoric, in favour of a more sober, even gloomy, approach, warning voters they face tough times and spending cuts ahead.
Despite his change of tone, and with the exception of a brief period when Gordon Brown enjoyed a bounce in the polls after becoming leader in 2007, Mr Cameron has ridden high in the polls throughout his time as leader. He will be hoping that translates into votes on election day.
All about: Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel, David Cameron. Silvio Berlusconi
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