Samantha Cameron


Samantha Gwendoline Cameron is a British businesswoman. Until 13 May 2010, she was the Creative Director of Smythson of Bond Street.
She became the spouse of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom when her husband, David Cameron, was elected into 10 Downing Street from 2010 to 2016. She took on a part-time consultancy role at Smythson after he became Prime Minister.

Early life

Samantha Cameron is the elder daughter of Sir Reginald Sheffield, 8th Baronet and Annabel Lucy Veronica Jones. Sir Reginald and Annabel married on 11 November 1969. The couple divorced in 1974, after Samantha's younger sister, Emily Sheffield, was born in 1973.
Annabel later remarried to William Waldorf Astor III, nephew of her own stepfather Michael Langhorne Astor. They reside at Ginge Manor in Oxfordshire.
Samantha Sheffield's birth was registered in Paddington, London. She grew up on the estate of Normanby Hall, five miles north of Scunthorpe in North Lincolnshire, though not in the Hall itself, the family having moved out in 1963, some eight years prior to her birth.

Ancestors

Samantha Cameron is a great-granddaughter of Conservative Member of Parliament Sir Berkeley Sheffield and, through him, is a distant cousin of model and actress Cara Delevingne. The father of Samantha's maternal grandmother, Patricia Clifford, was Sir Bede Clifford, a descendant of King Charles II. Her great-grandparents also include the writer Enid Bagnold and her husband Sir Roderick Jones, head of Reuters.
Through her great-great-great-grandfather Sir Robert Sheffield, 4th Baronet, she is a fourth cousin of Pamela Harriman, first wife of Winston Churchill's son Randolph Churchill. This Sheffield ancestor was an MP for the same constituency as Thomas Corbett, also an ancestor.
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 In March 2015, unpublished photographs from the City of Leeds archives revealed that the panelling and mantelpiece in the study of Sutton Park had been imported from the Morning Room of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.

Education

Cameron initially went to St Helen and St Katharine, though she sat 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.

Family

She and David Cameron married on 1 June 1996 at the Church of St. Augustine of Canterbury, East Hendred, Oxfordshire, five years before he was first elected as MP for Witney at the 2001 general election.
The couple have had four children: Ivan Reginald Ian Cameron, Nancy Gwen Beatrice Cameron, Arthur Elwen Cameron and Florence Rose Endellion Cameron. 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.

Work and politics

Cameron's work for Smythson of Bond Street won her a British Glamour Magazine Award for Best Accessory Designer in 2009. In 2010, she was named in Tatlers Top 10 Best Dressed List.
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.

Charitable causes

Cameron is active for a number of charitable causes, and in June 2013 she became a patron for 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 October 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 Mail on Sunday 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". In September 2017, in an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Samantha Cameron revealed that she had sometimes voted for the Green Party.
Cameron is credited with coining the phrase "There is such a thing as society, it's just not the same thing as the state", 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 members of the Chipping Norton set.