Do we like David Cameron?
Our score: 6 out of 10. A strong record on LGBTQ+ rights, but the lobbying row and his Israel arms stance leave real marks.
David Cameron led the Conservatives to government in 2010 and was prime minister until 2016. He had been the MP for Witney since 2001 and stepped down from Parliament after losing the Brexit referendum he called. Years later he came back as foreign secretary and a life peer, which is a long way from the political wilderness.
Here's the bit our readers will care about. PinkNews credited him with introducing same-sex marriage, the pardon for Alan Turing, and a change in the Tory party's tone on LGBT rights. It also said he raised LGBT rights with world leaders including Vladimir Putin. Most of his own backbenchers weren't thrilled, which makes it a bigger deal.
The black mark on the CV is Greensill. After leaving office, Cameron lobbied ministers for the finance firm that later collapsed. He told MPs he held shares in it and was paid a “generous annual amount”. A Treasury Committee inquiry in July 2021 found he showed a “significant lack of judgement”, though it didn't say he broke the rules.
On Gaza, as foreign secretary in April 2024 he said the UK would keep its arms export licences to Israel unchanged after reviewing legal advice, while voicing “grave concerns” on humanitarian access. Amnesty International UK called it a missed opportunity, and hundreds of lawyers had urged a halt to sales. Defenders would say he kept to the government's legal advice. Where you land depends on how you read it.
There's also a contested allegation. Middle East Eye reported in June 2025, citing unnamed sources, that Cameron had privately threatened the ICC over arrest warrants for Israeli officials on a call in April 2024. Cameron hasn't commented, and several MPs called for an investigation. It remains an allegation, and it comes from a single outlet.
On the planet and everyone else, we found nothing in his own words that fits the harm pattern: no conspiracy theories, no culture-war grifting, no campaigning against trans people. That said, our searches turned up little on his climate record. The good: he became unpaid president of Alzheimer's Research UK in 2017. Full Fact has fact-checked him dozens of times and noted that he corrected the parliamentary record on one claim.