The David Cameron story
Brian Wheeler www.facebook.com
The life and times of David Cameron, who has stood down as Britain's prime minister.
BBC News
Whatever else he achieved during his six years in power, David Cameron, who quit as prime minister in July and has now announced he is to step down as an MP, will forever be remembered as the man who took Britain out of the European Union.

It is a strange epitaph for a political leader who once vowed to stop his party "banging on about Europe" and it is hardly the way he would have wanted to go down in history.

He led the Conservative Party for nearly 11 years - only Stanley Baldwin, Lady Thatcher and Sir Winston Churchill spent longer in the job in modern times - returning them to power after more than a decade in the political wilderness.

When he burst on to the scene in 2005, beating better-known rivals to the party leadership, he wanted to be seen as a new kind of Conservative, young, liberal-minded, socially concerned and, above all, modern.

There would be no place in Cameron's Conservative Party for the toxic rows about the European Union that had brought the party to the brink of destruction under previous leaders.

Instead, there would be a positive, upbeat, inclusive vision of Britain. He spoke of making the Conservatives the party of the NHS and the environment and of "sharing the proceeds of growth" with the less well-off.

One of his proudest early achievements was to get a round of applause from a Conservative conference audience for civil partnerships.

When the 2008 banking crisis hit, his tone changed - the social reforms were still there but they were accompanied by a more traditional Conservative focus on balancing the books through public spending cuts. He always refused to see a contradiction between the two goals, arguing that the country could do "more with less".

A self-styled pragmatist, who claimed to be suspicious of ideology, Mr Cameron was always able to trim his positions to suit the times.

It was this flexibility that enabled him to form alliances with political opponents, most notably with Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, in the first coalition government since the war, and later when he shared platforms with Labour figures during the referendum campaign.

But it was a quality that bred suspicion and, in the end, outright hostility among his more ideologically pure Conservative colleagues, who wondered what, if anything, he stood for.

His privileged background also became a source of resentment for some in his party, who preferred their leaders in the grammar-school educated, self-made mould of a Thatcher or Major.

Mr Cameron was the first Conservative leader since the early 1960s to have attended one of Britain's top fee-paying schools, Eton, and he can trace his ancestry back to William IV, making him a distant relative of the Queen.

The third of four children, he was born on 9 October 1966 in London and spent the first three years of his life in Kensington and Chelsea before the family moved to an old rectory near Newbury, in Berkshire.

Mr Cameron's mother, Mary, served as a Justice of the Peace for 30 years. During her time on the bench she passed judgement on the Greenham Common protesters, including on one occasion her own sister and eco-warrior Swampy, who was protesting against the construction of the Newbury bypass.

At the age of seven, the young Cameron was packed off to Heatherdown, an exclusive preparatory school, which counted Princes Edward and Andrew among its pupils. Then, following in the family tradition, came Eton.

He has described his 12 O-levels as "not very good", but he gained three As at A-level, in history, history of art and economics with politics.

His biggest mention in the Eton school magazine came when he sprained his ankle dancing to bagpipes on a school trip to Rome.

Before going to Oxford to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics he took a gap year, working initially for Sussex Conservative MP Tim Rathbone, before spending three months in Hong Kong, working for a shipping agent, and then returning by rail via the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

At Oxford, he avoided student politics because, according to one friend from the time, Steve Rathbone, "he wanted to have a good time".

He was captain of Brasenose College's tennis team and a member of the Bullingdon dining club, famed for its hard drinking and bad behaviour, a period Mr Cameron has always refused to talk about.

He has also consistently dodged the question of whether he took drugs at university.

For some, his handling of the referendum issue, by offering last-minute concessions to the nationalists, added to the idea of Mr Cameron as an "essay crisis" prime minister, who only gets fully engaged with an issue when all seems lost.

Mr Cameron had agreed to a referendum thinking it would settle the issue of Scottish independence once and for all - similar logic that led him to promise a referendum on Britain's continued membership of the EU, in January 2013.

Both decisions, in their different ways, would prove to be spectacular misjudgements.

When he made the EU referendum promise, the Conservatives were losing support to the UK Independence Party, a Eurosceptic outfit he had once airily dismissed as a collection of "fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists".

Europe was not the issue it might have been at the 2015 general election had he not promised a referendum, and, in the end, UKIP only managed to win one seat.

But it was Mr Cameron's warnings to voters not to put the economy at risk by voting Labour that appears to have had the biggest impact, despite critics carping that he was running a negative, fear-based campaign.

The polls suggested another hung Parliament, but Mr Cameron proved the polls wrong and won a slender majority of his own - forming the first Conservative-only government since Sir John Major's in 1992.

He moved quickly to exploit the disarray in the Labour Party, following the election of unknown and untested left winger Jeremy Corbyn as leader, to position the Conservatives as a moderate, "one nation" force and the "party of working people", with a view to securing it in government for a generation.

This was starkly at odds, said critics, with his government's renewed commitment to austerity, but Mr Cameron was also keen to secure a legacy of social reform, with plans to improve the "life chances" of ethnic minorities and the socially disadvantaged.

His honeymoon period was short-lived, however, as his government suffered a string of defeats at the hands of his own backbenchers, most notably over Chancellor George Osborne's plans to cut disability benefits.

And his decision to go for an early referendum saw him pitched into a round of shuttle diplomacy with fellow European leaders, as he attempted to put together a new deal aimed at keeping Britain in the EU.

He placed himself front and centre of the negotiations and the referendum campaign that followed - his use of the personal pronoun was striking, it was always "my referendum". The deal he returned was, predictably, dismissed by critics as falling far short of what he had promised, particularly on the issue of the free movement of people.

But Mr Cameron insisted the curbs on welfare payments he had wrung out of the other EU leaders would help control immigration - and the man who had insisted he would "rule nothing out" if he did not get what he wanted from Brussels was now transformed into a passionate advocate for Britain's continued membership of the EU.

It was a shift in position too far for many in his party, the majority of whom wanted Britain out of the EU.

And despite returning them to power months earlier, they were in no mood to be told what to do by Mr Cameron. He was forced to suspend collective cabinet responsibility, allowing ministers to campaign for either side in the referendum, even though the government's official position was for Britain to remain in the EU.

Former London Mayor Boris Johnson, a former schoolmate at Eton, who had long been seen as positioning himself to take over as leader and prime minister from Mr Cameron, dealt him an early blow by joining the Leave campaign.

But what was more bruising for the prime minister was that Justice Secretary Michael Gove, one of his closest friends and allies, decided to campaign for Leave.

Despite early promises that they would remain civil to each other, the campaign unleashed the kind of brutal civil war at the top of the Conservative Party that Mr Cameron had spent his entire career trying to prevent.

And although he had promised during the campaign to stay on as prime minister whatever the result of the referendum, it turned out to be a forlorn hope.

After leaving Downing Street, Mr Cameron initially suggested he was keen to remain as an MP until 2020 at least - noting that he had plenty of experience that he wanted to impart and Parliament was the poorer when senior figures took their leave.

He even made a surprise appearance on the Commons backbenches to support his successor Theresa May in a vote on the Trident nuclear deterrent.

However, after a "period of reflection" over the summer, he announced he would be standing down and leaving frontline politics for good - saying that for him to remain in Parliament would be an "enormous distraction and diversion" to Mrs May.

He leaves Westminster having succeeded in changing the Conservative Party in many ways, recruiting more women and ethnic minority MPs, and having got the party back into government from what had looked a fairly hopeless position in 2005.

But he never managed to win over its powerful right wing, who mistrusted his liberal brand of Conservatism and what they saw as his elitist, patrician style of government.

It was this, allied to his fateful decision to try and settle the toxic issue of Europe by taking it head on, that proved to be his undoing in the end.