Samantha Cameron

Samantha Gwendoline Cameron (née Sheffield; born 18 April 1971) is an English businesswoman and the wife of David Cameron, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Until 13 May 2010, Cameron was the Creative Director of Smythson of Bond Street. Cameron took on a part-time consultancy role at Smythson after her husband became Prime Minister.

Charles II, Cameron's 8th great grandfather

Samantha Cameron is the elder daughter of Sir Reginald Sheffield, 8th Baronet (a landowner descended from King Charles II of England) and Annabel Lucy Veronica Jones. Sir Reginald and Annabel married on 11 November 1969. Samantha's sister, Emily Julia Sheffield was born in 1973; the couple divorced in 1974.

Annabel later remarried to William Waldorf Astor III, nephew of her own stepfather Michael Langhorne Astor. They reside at Ginge Manor in Oxfordshire.

Samantha Cameron's birth was registered in Paddington, London. She grew up on the 300-acre (121-hectare) estate of Normanby Hall, five miles (8 km) north of Scunthorpe in North Lincolnshire.

Notable ancestors

Samantha Cameron is the great-granddaughter of Conservative Member of Parliament Sir Berkeley Sheffield, and Sir Bede Edmund Hugh Clifford, Governor of the Bahamas, Mauritius and Trinidad and Tobago, who was a descendant of Charles II, and of the author and playwright Enid Bagnold. Sir Bede was the father of her maternal grandmother, Patricia Clifford.

Through her great-great-great grandfather Sir Robert Sheffield, 4th Baronet, she is a fourth cousin of the late Pamela Harriman, first wife of Randolph Churchill.

Samantha Cameron's family also own a large Yorkshire estate called Sutton Park. In March 2015, unpublished photographs from the City of Leeds archives revealed that the panelling and mantelpiece in the study of Sutton Park had been imported from the Morning Room of Potternewton Hall, near Leeds, which was the ancestral estate of Olive Middleton. Olive was the great grandmother of Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge. The room's "priceless interior" had been designed by royal architect Henry Flitcroft in the 1720s.

Cameron was educated at the School of St Helen and St Katharine, an independent school for girls in Abingdon, Oxfordshire and then took A levels at Marlborough College. She did an art foundation course at Camberwell College of Arts and then went on to study Fine Art at the School of Creative Arts, part of the University of the West of England.

Sutton Park – the Sheffield family seat

As a Marlborough College schoolfriend of David Cameron's sister Clare, Samantha first met her future husband at a party at the Camerons' house when Samantha was 16. After graduating from Bristol School of Creative Arts, Clare invited her on a Cameron family holiday in Tuscany, Italy, from where the romance with David started. The couple married on 1 June 1996 at the Church of St. Augustine of Canterbury, East Hendred, Oxfordshire, five years before he became an MP.

The couple have had four children: Ivan Reginald Ian Cameron (8 April 2002, Hammersmith and Fulham, London – 25 February 2009, Paddington, London), Nancy Gwen Beatrice Cameron (born 19 January 2004, Westminster, London), Arthur Elwen Cameron (born 14 February 2006, Westminster) and Florence Rose Endellion Cameron (born 24 August 2010, Cornwall). Ivan was born with a rare combination of cerebral palsy and severe epilepsy and died at the age of six at St Mary's Hospital, London. Florence Cameron's third given name, Endellion, is taken from the Cornish village of St Endellion. The couple's fourth child was born early while the Camerons were on holiday in Cornwall.

Cameron's work for Smythson of Bond Street won her a British Glamour Magazine Award for Best Accessory Designer in 2009. She also worked as a spokeswoman for Shiatzy Chen.

Two days after her husband became Prime Minister, she announced she was stepping down from her full-time role to take on a consultancy role within Smythson for two days a week. She said that choice was hers alone and had been made after she discovered she was pregnant again and after what she described as an "understandably difficult year", attributed to the death of her first child, Ivan.

Cameron serves as ambassador for the British Fashion Council and plays a prominent role in London Fashion Week. In 2010, she was named in Tatler's top 10 best-dressed list.

Charitable causes

Cameron is active for a number of charitable causes; and in June 2013 she became a patron for the British charity Vitalise.

Cameron has volunteered for Dress for Success, a non-profit organisation which gives free clothes and advice about job interviews to women who are unemployed. In 2012, she held a benefit for them at Number 10.

On 11 December 2015 it was announced that Cameron would be one of sixteen celebrities to participate in the Great Sport Relief Bake Off, which aired in 2016 as part of that year's Sport Relief fundraiser.

Cameron is an ambassador for the charity Save the Children. In March 2013, after visiting Syrian refugees in Lebanon, Cameron said: “As a mother, it is horrifying to hear the harrowing stories from the children I met today, no child should ever experience what they have. With every day that passes, more children and parents are being killed, more innocent childhoods are being smashed to pieces.”

Other issues

During March 2010, the Daily Mail reported that Cameron may have voted for Tony Blair's Labour party, and that she might vote for Gordon Brown in the 2010 general election, following comments made by Shadow Arts Minister, Ed Vaizey to Andrew Rawnsley during the making of a documentary for Channel 4. However, a Conservative spokesman issued a statement to blogger Iain Dale, stating that "The Mail on Sunday story is not true. Sam has never voted Labour and never will. She took five weeks off work to campaign for the Tories in Stafford in the 1997 general election". Samantha Cameron then issued her own statement: "I did not vote for Tony Blair in 1997 and I have never voted Labour".

Cameron is credited with coining the phrase "There is such a thing as society, it's just not the same thing as the state" (seen as a rejoinder to Margaret Thatcher's famous comment that there is "no such thing" as society), which has been said several times by David Cameron, including in his victory speech following his victory in the Conservative party leadership election in 2005.

The Camerons are notable members of the Chipping Norton set.

• 18 April 1971 - 1 June 1996 Miss Samantha Gwendoline Sheffield
• 1 June 1996 - present: Mrs Samantha Gwedoline Cameron