A son who inspired only goodness and love

Matthew d’Ancona reflects on the death of Ivan Cameron and the transformative impact this little boy had upon the man who will probably be our next Prime Minister

When people ask me about David Cameron’s character, and what sort of man he is, I always cite a very clear memory I have of sitting in the Commons with him in late 2003. He had been tasked by the then Tory leader, Michael Howard, to prepare the opposition’s response to the Hutton Report on the death of Dr David Kelly — a massive forensic undertaking, as well as a thorny political challenge. It was a mark of Howard’s confidence in the young man who was to be his successor that he assigned this task to him, and not to a Commons veteran.

As we chatted about the Iraq dossier and the Kelly affair, Cameron’s phone rang repeatedly. It was his wife, Samantha, at the hospital yet again with their firstborn, Ivan, then little more than a year old. I was touched and impressed by the gentleness in his tone and the strength that it conveyed. One minute we would be discussing the notorious claim that Saddam could launch weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes — the next he would be speaking softly to his understandably anxious wife about who would be staying overnight at the hospital and what arrangements they should make so that both of them could get a hot meal.

What struck me was that, for all his ambition and steely political focus, Cameron revealed himself as a man who understood what truly counted in life. In the two decades in which I have known him, he has always been a political obsessive, cheerfully open about his desire to clamber the greasy pole. Even in his early days as a junior political researcher he was marked out by his peers as a future party leader.