Claims that David Cameron has a £30m fortune sit uneasily with taxpayers. So what is the truth about his money?

By Geoffrey Levy for MailOnline and Christian Gysin for the Daily Mail
Updated: 20:33 EDT, 5 June 2009

With something roughly resembling a disarming smile, the BBC's Andrew Marr lobbed his hand grenade at the Leader of Her Majesty's Opposition, David Cameron.

'You're a wealthy man,' Marr asserted during an interview on his BBC1 show last Sunday.

'I mean, one of your constituents said you were worth 30 million and you've brushed it to one side.'

Cameron, laughing, replied: 'Well, it's not, it's simply not true.' Andrew Marr: 'It's not true?' Cameron (laughing): 'No, absolutely not true.'

David Cameron and his wife Samantha come from wealthy families

What was true was that one of Cameron's constituents in Witney, Oxfordshire, had indeed challenged him a few days earlier at a public meeting about being worth '30 million', and the Conservative leader had denied the fact.

Marr ended the exchange rather lamely by saying 'All right, but you're a well-off chap. . .' and moved on to other issues.

But the fascination with bike-riding Cameron's '£30million' refuses to go away. As does gossip of his alleged personal family fortune, helped by the Mail on Sunday's disclosure that he paid off the £75,000 mortgage on the £1.5 million home in North Kensington, London, that he owns with his wife Samantha, after they took out a £350,000 taxpayer-funded HSBC mortgage on his designated Oxfordshire constituency second home.

While within the rules, this is precisely the kind of financial jiggery-pokery for which other MPs have been criticised in recent weeks, as details of the way they have abused their second homes allowances have been made public.

For his part, Cameron claims he was able to pay off the mortgage on his London home by selling shares. But he is still open to the charge that someone who's clearly worth a few bob was 'playing' the system by claiming more than £21,200 from taxpayers in 2005-6, for the mortgage interest paid on his constituency home.

Aerial view of the Tory leader's home in Oxfordshire

It has been suggested that he could have saved the taxpayer thousands of pounds if he had put the money from the sale of his shares towards his constituency property - a large and comfortable country house - which he bought eight years ago for £650,000. Especially as it is now worth in the region of £1million, giving him a substantial paper profit.

So just how well-off are David and Samantha Cameron?

They certainly had enough to enlarge their London home by digging out the basement to make it part of their living accommodation - a job which experts say is likely to have cost £250,000. But do they really have millions?

Both of their family backgrounds are undoubtedly drenched in money.

David Cameron, elected Tory leader in December 2005, was brought up immersed in family wealth amassed in the City over generations.

This tradition of making money in finance goes back to his two great-great-grandfathers. One was Emile Levita, who was brought up in a family of Sephardic Jews. Married to a non-Jew, he came to Britain as an immigrant from Germany in the 1850s and was granted citizenship in 1871.

Emile enjoyed considerable financial success and became a director of the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China, which had offices in Threadneedle Street in the City.

He took on all the trappings of an English gentleman - he hunted, owned a grouse moor in Wales, and started an educational tradition which has continued through to today's Tory leader, by sending his four sons to Eton.

The London home of the Camerons

Imagine his delight when his eldest son, Arthur, a stockbroker, married Steffie Cooper, a cousin of the Royal Family. This union provides Cameron's link to the 'Mad' King George III, an ancestor he shares with the Queen (his fifth cousin once removed).

The other great-great-grandfather is Sir Ewen Cameron, who came south from Invernesshire in the 1860s to work for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. He helped arrange the all-powerful Rothschilds selling war bonds during the Russo-Japanese war.

The line of ancestors down from these wealthy figures continues through the City. Both Cameron's grandfather, also called Ewen, who died in 1958 leaving £57,000 (around £1million in today's money), and his father Ian, a former High Sheriff of Berkshire, were stockbrokers.

Ian Cameron emulated both his own father and grandfather by becoming a partner in the historic and highly prestigious stockbroking house Panmure Gordon.

Now retired, he is understood to have received upwards of £2million (worth more than £4million today) when, in the so-called 'Big Bang' that deregulated the Stock Exchange 22 years ago, the then 111-year-old company sold out to a U.S. bank.

And, as a director of upmarket estate agent John D. Wood, he would also have benefited from another windfall when it was floated on the Stock Exchange in 1987, and sold ten years later.

Three years ago, when downsizing by swapping houses in Berkshire with their eldest son Alex, a barrister, Ian Cameron and his wife Mary also made £800,000 from the auction of two paintings by the 19th-Century French artist Jean-Baptiste Greuze.

Ian Cameron's personal fortune has been conservatively estimated at £10million by Philip Beresford, the wealth watchdog and compiler of the Sunday Times Rich List.

At 76, it would be surprising if this charming figure, a former chairman of the most aristocratic of gentlemen's clubs, White's - whose members include his son David as well as the Prince of Wales - had not made sensible inheritance arrangements to ensure that as little of his fortune as possible is grabbed by the State in death duties.

Of course, we do not know whether or not David Cameron has benefited from any possible financial planning by his father. In any case, it would not come to him alone because, in addition to elder brother Alex, he also has two sisters, Tania and Clare.

But what about Samantha Cameron? Her background is certainly aristocratic and definitely landed, far wealthier than her husband's.

Gone in minutes: Sir Reginald Sheffield posing in his stately Sutton Park home which was raided by thieves who went directly for a pair of valuable antiques

Her father, Sir Reginald Sheffield, 63, the eighth holder of a baronetcy that goes back to 1755, is estimated to be worth at least £20million, and possibly considerably more.

In a recent interview in which David Cameron was asked about property that he and Samantha owned, he mentioned casually that his wife didn't own any properties but 'owns a field in Scunthorpe'.

A field? It just so happens that Sir 'Reggie', as her father is known, owns some 3,000 arable acres in the Scunthorpe area of North Lincolnshire that have been in the family since the 16th century. Grain farmers in this fertile region are known to be among the richest in Britain, especially with food commodity prices soaring and top quality farmland in the area capable of reaching £7,000 an acre.

A family friend of the Sheffields observed yesterday: 'I can't say I know which field is Samantha's, but you can bet it's a pretty big one.'

Samantha has a younger sister Emily, 36, and three other siblings - half-brother Robert, 24, who helps run the family's Normanby Estate Company, and half-sisters, Daisy, 29, and Lucy, 28, who were all born to Sir Reginald and his second wife.

Sir Reginald lives near Scunthorpe at Thealby Hall, one of two grand houses that remained with the Sheffields after the family seat, Normanby Hall, was handed over to Lincolnshire Council in lieu of death duties in the 1960s.

He also uses his £5million stately mansion Sutton Park, a few miles north of York (inherited with another 1,000 acres from his mother in 1997), a Georgian house that is filled with antiques. 

Last month, in a 3am break-in, burglars stole two highly distinctive antiques - a Charles-Henri Cordier bronze bust of an oriental woman, and a Meissen tea pot in the shape of a monkey, each worth £20,000.

Another wealthy figure in Samantha's family is her stepfather, Viscount Astor, 57, who her mother married in 1976 after her divorce from Sir Reginald.

Lord Astor's family trust owns the property company Sableknight, valued at £130million, and his wealth has certainly contributed to Samantha and David's quality of life.

In the past, Cameron has been a regular visitor to his stepfather-in-law's 20,000-acre Tarbert estate on the 180-population Hebridean island of Jura, where he has shot stag. He and Samantha are unlikely, however, to benefit greatly from Lord Astor's estate, for he has two sons and a daughter of his own to consider.

Family ties: Sir Reginald shares his home with wife Lady Sheffield, the parents of Samantha Cameron

Samantha's mother, however - from whom she inherits her artistic talents - is successful in her own right. Running a shop in Knightsbridge, she was Princess Diana's favourite jeweller.

She later sold up and now runs trendy style and furniture business Oka - with 12 shops across the country - from which, interestingly, a number of Tory MPs from the so-called 'Notting Hill set' have, according to their expenses claims, bought stylish items paid for by the taxpayer.

But let us put all this wider family wealth on one side for the moment and look at the Camerons as an earning partnership.

As Leader of the Opposition, David's salary is £130,000 a year. But as creative director of the upmarket stationery company Smythson, Samantha probably earns considerably more than he does.

This week the former art scholarship girl from Marlborough College won Glamour magazine's accessories designer award for her work.

One of the reasons the Camerons were able to buy their London home was a bonus of around £300,000 that Samantha received in 2005 when there was a £15million management buy-out of Smythson.

Inside, neither of their homes is opulent or ostentatiously luxurious, nor are there any £20,000 Meissen teapots lurking about.

One recent visitor to the London house describes it as 'full of high-quality lighting. All the paintwork has been carried out to a very high standard'.

But what about that figure of £30million? It emerged some two years ago - from Philip Beresford himself. Here is what he said: 'I put the combined family wealth of David and Samantha Cameron at £30million plus. But the key phrase is "family wealth".'

As he explained yesterday: 'That calculation has been coming back to haunt me ever since I made it. It does not refer to David and Samantha Cameron alone. It refers to the considerable wealth of their wider families.

'They are classic London upper-middle class, comfortably off.'

So it rather looks as though the Camerons can't, at the stroke of a pen, lay their hands on many millions, after all.

Well, not in the short-term, anyway.