PROFILE SAMANTHA CAMERON:Introduced by her husband as the Conservative Party's 'secret weapon' in the run-up to the 'Mumsnet' election in the UK, Samantha Cameron's newly-announced fourth pregnancy is just the latest aspect of her profile that is set to grow, writes RÓISÍN INGLE
NEWLY PREGNANT Samantha Cameron took hot beverages and cake with a bunch of fashion journalists this week. The genteel knees-up was held in her capacity as creative head of posh stationers and fancy handbag purveyors Smythson rather than in her role as the wife of Britain’s next, quite possibly, maybe, prime minister. Her husband, Conservative Party leader David Cameron, recently declared that SamCam – she is now up there with SuBo and RPatz in the annoying abbreviated nickname league – is the Tories’ official “secret weapon” which means that everything, including her burgeoning bump, is up for grabs.
Pregnancy as a PR stunt may be a spot of biological choreography too far, even for a Tory party watching its lead over Labour narrow.
Unlike Gordon Brown’s wife Sarah, Samantha Cameron has stayed mostly in the background so far but is now to be deployed by Conservative Party HQ – rather like a stealth missile but with excellent skin, teeth and hair – twice a week in the run-up to the election.
Newspaper reports suggest fashion hacks did a mostly rubbish job of pretending to be interested in Smythson’s new leather arm candy and not, as was the truth, in SamCam and her pregnancy. They did, however, manage to elicit a quote which seemed a direct challenge to anyone who might be rude enough to suggest her motivations in expanding her family were anything other than personal.
“The timing’s not ideal, but we’d been trying for a while, and when you get to my age you can’t be too choosy about the timeframe,” said the woman who will be 39 next month.
All the same, in the way the British media declared “Worcester Woman” to be pivotal in Tony Blair’s 1997 victory, the upcoming political showdown had long been declared the “Mumsnet election”, in a reference to the potential influence of voters who congregate online to chat about everything from possetting to politics on the UK’s largest parenting internet forum.
Over on Mumsnet this week, the Cameron pregnancy was a hot topic among contributors who either dismissed out of hand the relevance of political spouses (“how patronising!”) or conceded that SamCam’s pregnancy could influence their vote. The birth of Cherie Blair’s fourth child Leo was thought to have given her husband a popularity boost at the time.
“In previous elections DH [dear husband] and I have applied the ‘who would you want on holiday with you test’,” confided one mumchatterer. “This year I think I may be changing tactics and going for the ‘whose wife would you want to be mates with’ test.”
SamCam, by all accounts, would pass that one with flying colours.
Even recently leaked “risqué” pictures of her posing for a fashion designer friend in embarrassing 1980s clobber, are being seen as evidence of her accessibility. Perfect mates material.
SAMANTHA GWENDOLINE SHEFFIELDcame into the Conservative leader's life as the best friend of his younger sister Clare. Love blossomed later, he has said, in the early 1990s when she joined the Camerons on holiday in Tuscany to celebrate David's parents' 30th wedding anniversary.
In a 2007 biography Cameron: The Rise of the New Conservative, the authors recount how Samantha was “far removed from the mould of his usual girlfriends”, with her arty, bohemian edge and low tolerance of the incessant political incursions on their precious time together. Among the titbits that give her the well-worn “hippy at heart” tag is the fact that she hung around with rap star Tricky at university and, on a whim, once got a dolphin tattooed on her ankle.
Another story has it that while the couple were relaxing in Cameron’s west London flat on a Sunday morning – he was, at the time, Norman Lamont’s political adviser, she was an art student in Bristol – the phone rang. Samantha, then 21, is said to have called out: “If that’s Norman Lamont, tell him to fuck off.”
Her upbringing was as charmed as they get. She is the daughter of Sir Reginald Adrian Berkeley Sheffield, baronet and owner of 300 acres of English farmland. Her mother – who remarried after splitting from Sir Reggie – is Annabel Astor, one of the original It girls in the 1960s and a shrewd businesswoman. “She wasn’t the kind of mum who tidied your room . . . but we never wanted her to be. We thought she was more glamorous than anyone else’s mother; the working was part of that,” Samantha has said.
The first time David Cameron stayed in Sutton Park, the sprawling 1730s Yorkshire home of the Sheffield family, Samantha’s grandmother Nancie played the smiling but strict hostess. Not yet married, the couple were accommodated in bedrooms at separate ends of the mansion. These sleeping arrangements didn’t deter Cameron who, according to his biographers, managed to negotiate the corridors of the house and find his girlfriend’s room. A few days later he received a package in the post from Sutton Park. It contained a pair of freshly ironed underpants with a terse note from Samantha’s grandmother: “You left these behind, and not in your own room.”
THE INTERVENING YEARShave seen her support her husband – she is said to be his sounding board for speeches, and her down-to-earth critiques may have diverted many a potential Cameron gaffe – while never losing sight of her own ambitions. In an interview she once said that she was not a typical "all-singing, all-dancing" politician's wife – "there isn't the time" – but her recent appearances suggest she knows she can still be an asset to her husband when it comes to a potential move to Number 10.
“We’ve been together 18 years and we’ve been, through, you know, fairly tough times and I can honestly say that I don’t think in all that time Dave’s ever let me down,” she told Trevor McDonald this week. The couple’s first-born child Ivan, who was severely disabled and suffered from birth with Ohtahara syndrome, a rare form of cerebral palsy combined with extreme epilepsy, died last year at the age of six.
In the same ITV programme SamCam confided the bombshell that Cameron is the messy-husband type. Where had we heard that before? Ah, from Mrs Obama, who discussed her own husband’s irritating habit of leaving his socks on the floor during his campaign. It certainly didn’t do Barack any harm.
And yet PR advisor Max Clifford is not convinced that David Cameron’s “secret weapon” tactic is going to pay off. He suggests Cameron’s background in PR is reason enough to be sceptical about the SamCam strategy which he describes as “one last desperate throw of the dice”.
“The whole point for those who study these things is that it doesn’t appear to be natural,” he says. “David Cameron is a PR man who wants to be prime minister. He is public relations personified. I think this latest strategy could go against him. I don’t think the British public want it. All of a sudden his wife is being pushed right into the thick of it and it looks wrong; people are more suspicious of that kind of thing and much more aware than they were in Tony Blair’s day”.
An old friend, the actor Helena Bonham Carter, once marvelled at Mrs Cameron’s multi-tasking in her roles as mother, Tory wife and powerful businesswoman: “Samantha juggles more balls than a multi-armed Indian goddess could cope with”. As SamCam spends more time in the glare of the political spotlight, the next few weeks will tell whether Frontline Political Spouse (With Child) is one role too far.
CV Samantha Cameron
Who is she?The wife of Tory leader David Cameron and creative director of luxury stationers Smythson
Why is she in the news?Cameron has declared her to be his "secret weapon" in the upcoming election, she has spoken about their relationship on an ITV documentary and she is pregnant with the couple's fourth child
Most likely to say:Put your dirty socks in the wash, Dave
Least likely to say:Me? I'm just a politician's wife.
