Samantha Cameron: ‘David loved employing women because they work harder’

David Cameron loves employing women because they work harder, his wife Samantha has said.

Mrs Cameron, 50, said she too believes women are sometimes “better at our jobs than men,” but are not so good at having the “ego” to go with it.

The businesswoman and wife of the former Conservative prime minister was speaking to the Telegraph’s Claire Cohen on her Imposters podcast, which you can listen to using the audio player below.

She said: “My husband always says he loves employing women because they work harder. They are perfectionists. What you get out of them is often much better than men.”

Recalling her Downing Street days, and the perspective it gave her on the corridors of power, Mrs Cameron spoke of the personalities in politics. She said: “Half the problem is dealing with the fragile egos... That kind of mix of lack of confidence and overconfidence, I think, is what makes Westminster the fascinating place that it is.”

David Cameron, 54, served as prime minister from 2010 to 2016. Mrs Cameron, who had built her own career and was creative director at the luxury stationery firm Smythson until her husband took office, described being “thrust into” the role of prime minister’s wife, without there being any expectations that she was “going to be any good at it or even... do it at all.”

She took on a part-time consultancy role at the firm once her husband was prime minister. At the time, critics suggested she was letting down working mothers. But Mrs Cameron said the comments did not wound her.

“I think if you are in the public eye, you have to take absolutely no notice of anything people say about you in the press, because if you did, you’d be a kind of wreck,” she told the podcast. “And the truth was that I decided to leave the business about five months before the election campaign had even begun, and handed in my notice. But we didn’t want to announce I was leaving in case people thought that I was assuming that David was going to win the election. So it was a very personal decision. It had nothing to do with either the election or whether he would or wouldn’t be prime minister... but you’re never going to get away from some negative connotation.”

In the event, Cameron’s Tory party fell short of an overall majority in the 2010 general election and so formed a coalition government with Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats. David Cameron became prime minister. But his wife felt unsure about how the move to Downing Street would affect them.

“I was very nervous about the impact that it would have on my family or my marriage, not especially my career at that stage,” she says. “And so I think that I decided early on to change as little as possible.”

She continued to work three days a week, while the couple kept their children in the same schools as before.

“We put in all our own furniture from home to make it feel as much like home as possible,” she went on. “I think my view was just not to get involved and to keep the rest of our life, our social life, exactly the same as it had been before we went in, on the basis that you knew you’d be coming out again at some point in the future, and to make sure that the life you had left was still there. I think I had this sort of fear that you'd come out the other side and suddenly have no friends.”

She did “the bits that were expected of me,” as prime minister’s wife, but no more. “I would say the minimum,” she added.

David Cameron resigned after the 2016 Brexit referendum – in which he had supported Remain – and was succeeded by Theresa May. Since 2017, Samantha Cameron has been the driving force behind her own fashion label, the workwear brand Cefinn.

Have you ever felt like a fraud? That you don't belong in the room? That you could get found out at any moment? You're not alone. Each week on Imposters, Claire Cohen meets a woman at the top of her game and finds out how she defeated imposter syndrome to get there. Listen using the audio player above or subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your preferred podcast app.