A model professional in No.10 – Andrew Gimson profiles Samantha Cameron

By Andrew Gimson
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Samantha Cameron is at first sight a difficult woman to profile. She has achieved what Andy Coulson, her husband’s former director of communications, calls the “near impossible” task of living in Number Ten for nearly three years while maintaining “a benign and broadly positive press”.

A Conservative peer observes how successfully Mrs Cameron plays what used to be a rather old-fashioned role:

“Samantha Cameron is the perfect modern Tory wife. Just think of the contrast between her and Lady Dorothy Macmillan. She has never been seen in a hat. She understands broken marriages—remaining in close, affectionate accord with both her father and step-father—while enjoying blissful happiness in her own marriage. She balances effortlessly all the competing calls on a modern Tory wife’s time which include substantial business interests of her own without the fuss that so many of her contemporaries make. She has tremendous classless style. While her husband endures brickbats she commands universal admiration and affection.”

Mrs Cameron is visible, but not too visible. She looks pleased to meet people, but not too pleased; self-possessed, without seeming too self-possessed; stylish, without being outré. One never gets the sense that she is determined to hog the limelight, or to throw her weight around. She manages to be open, yet unrevealing.

Which is why writing about her is an awkward task. She has perfected the art of being, in her public appearances, neither dull nor interesting. Her recent visit as an ambassador for Save the Children to Syrian refugees in Lebanon was covered by the release of a video, just over a minute long, in which she was seen talking to people and recounting a meeting with one of them: “It’s so shocking it’s difficult to take in. Her three-year-old son was shot by a sniper at a checkpoint, a sniper aiming at a car full of seven children, I mean it’s just, you know you just can’t imagine why that should happen.”