David Cameron opens up about loss of life of six-year-old son – ‘I dream about him’

David Cameron has opened up about the death of his six-year-old son from the rare genetic condition Ohtahara syndrome.

The former PM, whose son Ivan passed away the year before he became Prime Minister in 2010, said over time he has learned to live with his grief. “Over time, happy memories come through, and you have dreams and memories of them being happy, and the smiles they gave you and the love that you shared with them,” he said in an emotional radio interview.

The Tory politician recounted how the illness and death of his son brought him and his wife Samantha even closer together. “The first thing you learn is essentially how much you love your wife and how much you want to stay together through the most difficult times, and how you want to try and deal with it together,” Lord Cameron said. “I mean, we always had a happy marriage, but it definitely, you know, we felt we were Team Ivan trying to help him.”

Lord Cameron, who most recently served as Foreign Secretary in Rishi Sunak’s government, this week was announced as chairman of the Oxford-Harrington Rare Disease Centre’s advisory council, which develops new treatments for rare genetic diseases. He has spoken about how he believes modern medicine would have given his son a longer and different life.

Asked about Ivan’s memory, Lord Cameron told LBC radio on Wednesday: “Obviously, hopefully, over 20 years, you learn to live with your grief. And happy memories, as I always say to anyone who’s lost anybody close to them, to start with its dark clouds and nothing ever seems that it’s going to come right. And over time, happy memories come through, and you have dreams and memories of them being happy, and the smiles they gave you and the love that you shared with them.

“And so that has got much better over the years, as you’d expect, but the memory of what it was like having a desperately ill child and rushing from hospital to hospital, doctor to doctor, to try and find out what was wrong, I still remember that very clearly. And also I remember being told, I asked, what happens, should we have other children? And they said, best information at the time, well, we don’t really know whether it’s genetic or not, so one in four chance this might happen again.”

Lord Cameron said he and his wife decided to “gamble” and now have three “lovely, healthy, happy” children. He said today it’s not such a “lottery” as more is known about genome sequencing, adding: “You’d be able to give more information to parents. Even if you couldn’t find a cure, the state of mind is so much better if you can say to someone, this is exactly what your child has got.”