24 hours in the life of Samantha Cameron
My alarm goes off at 5.45am
I listen to Farming Today on Radio 4 as I wake up. Depending on what I’m doing, I’ll either get up at 5.45am or somewhere between then and 6.30am, when I have to get my older children up. I don’t hit snooze but I won’t oversleep; I just listen to the radio.
On a Monday morning we have a personal trainer at 6.15
It’s quite brutal. It’s all kind of core, weights, in a confined space. Lots of sliders and then there’s a terrible bit at the end, 10 minutes of cardio, awful endless burpees. On a Friday morning I’ll try to do an hour’s yoga, and sometimes I have a teacher who comes. [Dave and I] do run together sometimes, we’re quite good exercising together. He plays a lot of tennis but I don’t – any team sports, anything where I have to be at all co-ordinated. I couldn’t do a step class. I’ve never tried spinning but I imagine I’d be doing the opposite of everyone. My co-ordination is not good.
I have a bath each morning That’s the whole point of getting up early. I like having a nice bath: Jo Malone bath essence, Radio 4. It’s my peace and quiet moment of the day before anyone else is up.
Dave is the shortorder chef on the breakfast front
I normally have porridge. With the children, he’ll shout up the stairs: “Do you want pancakes? Do you want omelettes? Do you want scrambled eggs?” And hopefully we have some kind of consensus. He’s a very good cook.
I need to be ready to leave the house at 8.15am
I take my little one to primary school. The older two leave at 7.30am.
They go on public transport, though sometimes we’ll give them a lift to the tube station if it’s pouring with rain or they’re late.
If I’m not taking Flo to school because Dave is, then I’ll try to get in early, or I’ll do emails at home for 45 minutes, but otherwise I’m in the Cefinn office by 9.15am at the latest I’m in meetings most of the time at work, so that’s email catch-up time – often I’ll go through a whole day and not have replied to any emails at all, and by the time I’ve put Flo to bed in the evenings I’m too tired. Working full time Monday to Friday, and having a mix of teenage children who don’t go to bed and a little one who you’re still doing homework and reading with and putting to bed, you’ve got it at all ends.
As the team gets bigger I try to build more structure into the week Mondays are always with the fit model all day, Tuesdays it’s sales and marketing meetings, and then the last three days I’ll be slightly juggling. I’ll either be on some kind of photo shoot or trying to do product development. We have monthly senior management meetings on a Friday.
Our office is somewhere there’s not much in the way of local cafés
I bring stuff in at the beginning of the week from my Ocado or Tesco delivery – salad, humous, eggs, cheese, whatever, and then make my lunch most days.
I really try not to snack
Since I hit 45 there are those three kilos that have crept on that are quite difficult to lose. But everyone in the office knows that if I’m really desperate it’s Twirl time.
I try to leave at 6pm, but in reality I often don’t leave until 6.30pm
My nanny finishes at 7pm, so I’m always home by 6.45pm. I’ve never really done [the school pick-up]. I’ve worked the whole way through having children so I’ve always tried to do the morning but never really done the afternoon. I tend to leave a bit earlier on a Friday. I meet the kids and we’ll take the train down to Oxfordshire, where Dave’s constituency used to be. We still have a cottage there.
I’ll practise spelling, times tables, and reading with Flora
And homework if she’s doing stuff that she or my nanny don’t understand. And at that point normally I probably won’t understand it either, and have to go on Youtube. With the older ones, I couldn’t help them with their maths, but with my little one, Youtube is great for long multiplication, long division. They do everything differently now from how I was taught it. I put Flo to bed before 8pm.
If my husband’s around, he’s really good at cooking supper and then we’ll eat with the teenagers
They might have eaten when they got home but they’re at that stage where they’ll happily eat two meals. We tend to be all together for all meals at the weekend, Friday through to Sunday, whereas in the week it can be a bit mixed. I try to be in two nights a week Monday to Thursday. I have work things, or trying to see girlfriends, or my sisters. I’ve got four.
Supper is normally curry, home-cooked – any kind of curry. [The children] have had to eat chilli from the day they were born, they had to eat grown up food from the moment they could eat as far as I was concerned. My son doesn’t like cheese unless it’s on pizza. That’s quite strange, because pizza is quite cheesy. But apart from that they will all eat pretty exotic food of all description.
We do watch quite a lot of telly. Recently I really enjoyed The Capture, and Dublin Murders at the moment. On the drama front I’m very excited about a potential new series of Sex Education. That was brilliant.
I like a cold lager in a glass
I’m quite particular. I’ve got quite a good gluten-free one at the moment called Daura.
I’m not someone who spends ages on Twitter and Instagram
So I don’t have a problem not looking at my phone, and I tend not to look at it in the evenings if possible.
We watch the first ten minutes of the 10 o’clock news...
...then I’m normally in bed by ideally by half-past ten. I read every night. I get through quite a lot of books – novels, fiction. And I sleep very well. I like my bed.