A TV appearance last night cements Samantha Cameron's influence on the campaign, writes MARK HENNESSY
FOR MONTHS, Samantha Cameron has been seen at the side of her husband, Conservative Party leader David Cameron, smiling, being supportive but rarely saying much.
Last night she entered the British general election campaign in an ITV interview with Trevor McDonald, describing her husband as a man “who’s definitely not perfect and like any husband he has lots of very irritating habits”.
Cruelly, the election has already been dubbed the WAGs’ election, one in which she and prime minister Gordon Brown’s wife Sarah will be major weapons used to attract voters’ affections.
Both are strong-willed and successful and both have suffered the loss of a child – the Camerons’ son, Ivan, died last year, while the Browns lost their daughter Jennifer shortly after her birth.
Samantha Gwendoline Sheffield is the eldest daughter of Sir Reginald Adrian Berkeley Sheffield, 8th Baronet, and a descendant of King Charles II of England. Her parents divorced when she was five, although her mother subsequently remarried William Astor, the fourth Viscount Astor – who served in John Major’s Conservative government in the 1990s.
She grew up on the 300-acre Normanby Hall estate in Lincolnshire and her family owns Sutton Park in Yorkshire.
Ms Cameron studied fine arts at the University of the West of England before working in the Smythsons’ luxury stationers business, which she is credited with having turned around.
Earlier this month she rejected charges that she had voted for Labour’s Tony Blair in 1997, following a TV interview by Tory insider Ed Vaizey. She is unlikely to have done, having spent five weeks working on the Tory election campaign in a Staffordshire constituency.
“I did not vote for Tony Blair in 1997 and I have never voted Labour,” she said.
While last night might have been her first frontline appearance in the campaign, Ms Cameron has already wielded influence, since her husband has long run draft speeches by her. She is said to be the one who came up with his most pithy quote so far: “There is such a thing as society. It just isn’t the same thing as the state.” The decision to bring her directly into the campaign was inevitable following Sarah Brown’s two appearances at Labour Party conferences and her success among Twitter users, where her pronouncements are followed daily by 700,000 people.
However, the concern will now be that last night's TV appearance may attract ever closer attention on Ms Cameron from the British press. The first signs of that emerged yesterday in a diary piece in the Mail on Sunday, which claimed she did not know what the phrase "one-nation Toryism" meant – one that has been used by her husband to define his political beliefs. One-nation Toryism – an invention of 19th-century Tory prime minister Benjamin Disraeli – has been used to describe the left-wing element of the Conservative Party, one that puts a greater stress on caring for the poor.