His staff worry how the seismic blow of the loss of his father might affect him in the busy autumn political season now upon them. ‘I am the sort of Englishman who cries at weddings, not funerals,’ he says to reassure them. There is barely any time for grieving: He fits in a European Council between the death and funeral, and makes it clear it is business as usual. But there are to be many moments in the coming years, notably during the Jubilee and Olympics summer of 2012, when he becomes sad and nostalgic that his father cannot see him leading the country. He is distressed too that Ian never had the chance to see his grandchild, Florence Rose Endellion, born in Cornwall on 24 August, just two weeks before he dies.
These weeks have been a roller coaster for the Cameron family. His own feet indeed had hardly touched the ground since the New Year, and the intense start to his premiership means that he had been looking forward more than usual to a proper summer holiday. He and Samantha left for Cornwall in mid-August in high spirits. Some turbulence had followed some over-hasty comments in late July, that Gaza was a ‘prison camp’, spoken when he was in Turkey, and that Pakistan was ‘looking both ways’ on terrorism, uttered the next day when he was in India.8 Andy Coulson and the team had tried to make a virtue of him being a ‘shoot from the hip’ kind of leader.9 But he is happy overall with how he has begun as PM, with his response to Bloody Sunday, his Obama meetings and stance on the economy. Samantha is feeling much happier in Number 10 than she had expected, though she is still painfully shy. She has redesigned the flat (largely at their own expense) to look elegant but homely, like all the places they had lived in: ‘She had properly nested in it,’ says an aide. ‘She was feeling much more settled and her state of mind soothes him. They have a home upstairs in Downing Street to escape to, which she likes, and that helps him too.’ When Samantha is happy, so is he.
Once in north Cornwall, they plan to get the mandatory press photographs over with at the beginning. Samantha does not enjoy the ritual, especially as she is clearly so pregnant, putting on a brave face in a bright yellow dress. The idea is to have a few days resting on holiday before coming back to London for the birth. But events move quickly and Florence is born at the Royal Cornwall Hospital in Truro on Tuesday 24 August. It is ‘a bit of a shock’, Cameron says, but not entirely unexpected because ‘Samantha’s babies have tended to come a bit early’.10
The birth is another big adjustment for both of them, bringing home once and for all that they are no longer private citizens but surrounded, even on these most intimate occasions, by staff and security, with the media and its invasiveness never more than a door or a window away. He realises that he cannot even go to the shop for nappies or the small things that Samantha needs. Some in the media are caught trying to talk to the nurses looking after them. Samantha’s anaesthetist is a refugee from Gaza: even at the moment of delivery, Cameron is asked, half-jokingly, about lifting the blockade on Gaza. As with all their previous children, the baby is delivered by caesarean section. Florence is their fourth child, a sister to Nancy and Arthur, aged six and four.11 ‘She is an unbelievably beautiful girl and I’m a very proud dad,’ he says.12 ‘Florence is a great source of happiness for him,’ says a friend.
Number 10 announces he is taking paternity leave. He throws himself into looking after Nancy and Arthur, and visiting Samantha and Florence in hospital. He is due to address the UN General Assembly on 24 September so asks Clegg to go in his place, the first Liberal Democrat leader from the UK ever to address the body. On 3 September he and Samantha pose for an official photograph outside Downing Street on a brief return to London. A member of the public called Mary has knitted a shawl which she has sent to Samantha. She is contacted by Number 10 to say Florence will be wearing her creation. The photo of David and Samantha showing off Florence becomes the image on their first Christmas card from Number 10 in December.
The Cameron family depart for Chequers for a few days of rest and seclusion behind its high walls, protected by police. Domestic joys vie in his mind with work anxieties. As we will see in the next chapter, storm clouds are gathering over a scandal enveloping Andy Coulson. It gnaws away at him. ‘We had bleak and grim moments among the team,’ recalls one. Adrenaline is further pumped into the system with the publication of Tony Blair’s memoirs A Journey. Everyone at Number 10 seems to be reading it or listening to it on tape. Blair is referred to in hushed tones by some as ‘the master’; he is seen as the supreme political operator taking on his party, dominating the media with his command of communications, and providing strong leadership from Downing Street. Blair’s reflections about his premiership lend weight to Hilton’s thesis that Cameron must move at pace. The master squandered his first term, as Blair himself admits in his book. Cameron’s team are even more determined not to make the same mistake. The youthful Blair will not remain a model for long.
The joy of Florence’s birth turns his mind back to his grief at the loss of his six-year-old son Ivan, in February 2009. Ivan was born in April 2002 with the very rare Ohtahara syndrome which left him with both epilepsy and cerebral palsy. Ivan had a number of seizures over the years but his death came as a surprise and terrible shock to his parents. Gordon Brown cancelled PMQs that day out of respect. Cameron does not have the regard for Brown personally that he has for other PMs. But he did that day. Brown himself had lost a daughter, Jennifer, aged just ten days, in 2002: ‘The death of a child is an unbearable sorrow that no parent should ever have to endure,’ Brown said to a hushed chamber in the House of Commons.13 Nothing in Cameron’s life has affected him as deeply as the birth, life and death of his son Ivan. Birthdays and anniversaries are particularly painful. He and Samantha attend the church in Oxfordshire where Ivan is buried. He will never be the same man again. ‘David was just another talented Etonian until Ivan,’ says long-standing friend Andrew Feldman. ‘What Ivan gave him was compassion and humanity.’14 Those closest to him agree that Ivan has softened him and given him a humility he might not otherwise have developed. Cameron’s fondness and respect for the NHS is another impact: ‘I am someone who has relied on the NHS … who knows what it’s like to go to hospital night after night with a child in your arms … knowing that when you get there, you have people who will care for that child, and love that child like their own,’ he says in his party conference speech four years later, visibly and unusually allowing emotion to break through in public. Few have so shaped his premiership as much as Ivan.
If Ivan and Ian were the greatest influences on him, Samantha is the sheet anchor of his life and premiership. She brings him down to earth. ‘She is so creative and supportive. The key thing for me is sanity at home. Samantha is absolutely amazing at it,’ he says. ‘Take our first summer in 2010. We’d been living in the flat above Downing Street and then we went off to Cornwall, and she had our baby and somehow or other she manages to completely redesign our flat and make it a home for us all.’15 He cannot fathom how she manages to bring up the family, maintain her own work as a creative consultant at the luxury leather goods firm Smythson, and be extensively involved in charity without courting personal publicity.
Her head is not turned by the glamour of her role; indeed, a criticism is that she is too retiring in her role as ‘First Lady’ and does not attend as many official events as might a more ambitious consort. Equally, no PM’s wife in the modern era, with the exception of Cherie Blair, has simultaneously managed to cope with having a child while bringing up a family in Number 10. Samantha takes care not to express her views in public, and only rarely to her husband in private. Although from a privileged background herself, her down-to-earth approach to life has helped smooth away some of his more privileged attitudes and opinions, epitomised by his membership of the much-ridiculed upper-class Bullingdon Club when at Oxford from 1985–8. She has become content enough at Downing Street, but she looks forward to the day when the commotion of their lives there is over.
Besides the impact of Samantha, he attributes his almost uncanny calm in the face of constant pressures and adversities to ‘getting the diary right’, by which