Key figures: David Cameron (Prime Minister), Nick Clegg (Deputy Prime Minister), Gordon Brown (outgoing Labour PM), George Osborne (Chancellor of the Exchequer)
Background and Political Rise
David William Donald Cameron was born on October 9, 1966, in London, and educated at Eton College and Brasenose College, Oxford, where he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics and graduated with a first-class degree in 1988. After a decade working in Conservative Central Office and then as Director of Corporate Affairs at Carlton Communications, he was elected MP for Witney, Oxfordshire, in 2001.
Cameron became leader of the Conservative Party on December 6, 2005 — defeating David Davis by 134,446 votes to 64,398 in a membership ballot — and immediately set out a modernizing agenda that sought to detoxify the party’s image after three consecutive election defeats. Key early moves included rebranding around the slogan “Vote Blue, Go Green,” appearing at environmental events, and committing the party to maintaining core National Health Service spending. By deliberately avoiding the harder-edged language on immigration and Europe that had defined the party in the William Hague and Michael Howard eras, Cameron sought to broaden the Conservatives’ electoral coalition. His approach was partly modeled on Tony Blair’s Labour modernization of the 1990s and drew frequent comparisons — sometimes applied sardonically by opponents — between the two leaders’ centrist positioning.
The 2010 Election and Coalition Formation
The May 6, 2010 general election produced a hung parliament in which no party won the 326 seats required for an outright majority. The Conservatives won 306 seats with 36.1% of the vote (10,706,647 votes), Labour fell to 258 seats (29.0%), and the Liberal Democrats took 57 seats (23.0%) — an outcome in which the first-past-the-post system translated the Liberal Democrats’ near-quarter share of the vote into fewer than one-tenth of Commons seats.
What followed were five days of intensive coalition negotiations. Gordon Brown remained in Downing Street as caretaker Prime Minister while parallel talks explored a possible Labour–Liberal Democrat arrangement and a Conservative–Liberal Democrat agreement. The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats negotiated intensively across the weekend of May 8–9, working through 36 policy areas. Key compromises included:
- A fixed-term parliament of five years (enacted as the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011)
- A referendum on the Alternative Vote electoral system (held May 5, 2011; rejected 67.9% to 32.1%)
- A deficit reduction programme combining spending cuts with a rise in the personal income tax threshold to £10,000, phased in by 2014
- Agreement to cap non-EU immigration and introduce a new National Scholarship Programme in higher education
Gordon Brown resigned as Prime Minister and Labour leader at 7:00 p.m. on May 11, 2010, delivering a final statement outside No. 10 Downing Street with his wife and children. David Cameron entered Downing Street as Prime Minister at 8:43 p.m. that evening, with Nick Clegg confirmed as Deputy Prime Minister the following morning.
Summary
At age 43, Cameron became the youngest British Prime Minister since Robert Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of Liverpool, who took office in 1812 at 42. He had spent barely nine years as an MP before reaching the premiership, a striking ascent by modern standards.
The Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition was constitutionally notable as the first formal peacetime coalition government in the United Kingdom since the wartime National Government of 1940–45. Cameron and Clegg appeared together at a joint press conference in the Downing Street rose garden on May 12, presenting a show of political unity that many commentators initially found remarkable given the parties’ longstanding rivalry. The coalition governed for a full five-year term, with 57 Liberal Democrat MPs sharing Cabinet and junior ministerial positions with Conservative counterparts.
Cameron’s government moved quickly to address public finances. The 2010 Spending Review, announced by Chancellor George Osborne on October 20, set out £81 billion in spending reductions over four years — one of the largest fiscal consolidation programmes in postwar British history. The measures deeply divided opinion: proponents argued they were necessary to restore fiscal credibility following borrowing of £153 billion in fiscal year 2009–10 (approximately 11.1% of GDP); critics contended that cutting spending while unemployment remained near 2.5 million undermined the recovery. The austerity debate would define domestic British politics throughout the decade and bear on discussions of similar measures elsewhere in Europe, including the European sovereign debt crisis.
Significance
David Cameron’s accession to the premiership in 2010 was a watershed in British political history for several interconnected reasons.
Constitutional precedent: The coalition government was a rare phenomenon in British politics, which had operated under single-party majority governments for most of the postwar period. The process of coalition formation — publicized negotiations, a written agreement, a shared programme for government — established procedures that would be referenced in subsequent discussions about how hung parliaments should be managed. The experience also highlighted tensions in the constitutional convention that the incumbent Prime Minister holds office until a successor is confirmed, prompting calls for more codified transition rules.
Generational shift: Cameron’s arrival ended the Blair-Brown era that had dominated British politics since 1994. At 43, he was the first Prime Minister born after the Second World War and belonged to a generation whose formative political experiences were Thatcherism and the fall of communism rather than the post-1945 welfare state settlement. His leadership reflected the emergence of a networked, media-savvy political class trained in think tanks and strategic communications.
European tensions: The coalition’s early years exposed deep Conservative divisions over European integration that Cameron had tried to manage during opposition. Pressure from backbench MPs and the growing United Kingdom Independence Party forced a series of accommodations — eventually including the 2011 European Union Act’s “referendum lock” on further powers transfers — that foreshadowed the dynamics that would produce Cameron’s 2013 Bloomberg Speech pledge of an in-or-out referendum. The trajectory set in motion by the May 2010 government formation would culminate in the June 2016 Brexit referendum, which Cameron called and lost, prompting his resignation.
Parallel in context: The Conservative victory paralleled center-right gains across Western democracies in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis; a strikingly similar dynamic played out seven months later in the 2010 US midterm elections, where Republican gains reshaped the Obama presidency’s second half. Both reflected widespread public discontent with incumbent governments that had overseen economic downturns. Cameron’s rise also echoed international patterns of younger leaders forming unconventional governing arrangements in 2010, such as Julia Gillard becoming Australia’s first female Prime Minister just six weeks later on June 24.
Related
- The election that produced the hung parliament is detailed in 2010 United Kingdom General Election.
- The parallel center-right swing in the United States seven months later is covered in 2010 US Midterm Elections.
- Another 2010 leadership transition producing an unconventional government is examined in Julia Gillard Becomes Australia’s First Female Prime Minister.
- The economic crisis that shaped the coalition’s austerity agenda is analysed in European Sovereign Debt Crisis.