David Cameron’s director of communications feared that the then prime minister would have to resign over the family revelations contained within the Panama Papers, according to his newly published book.

Sir Craig Oliver details the chaos behind the scenes at Downing Street following the Guardian’s investigation of the Cameron family’s tax affairs in April, which revealed that the prime minister’s father had been a director of an offshore fund called Blairmore Holdings.

In his book on Brexit, Unleashing Demons, Sir Craig Oliver says “there is a real danger of this going out of control”.

After the Guardian published the story, Cameron and his wife, Samantha, had “an unhappy couple of hours in calls” with their accountant, before putting out a statement saying that the “prime minister, his wife and their children do not benefit from any offshore funds”.

This statement only precipitated further questions from the media.

Oliver writes: “There’s no doubt about it – we are on the run on the PM’s father’s offshore company Blairmore.”



After days of trying to understand Blairmore’s tax arrangements, Oliver writes that Cameron could survive the crisis. “I go from feeling sick about this – and having a small worry that this could all unravel to the point where the PM ends up having to resign – to thinking this is OK.”

Cameron was forced into a series of embarrassing disclosures over several days, including the fact that he had personally owned shares in Blairmore.

As part of the Panama Papers investigation carried out in partnership with the International Consortium of Journalists and Süddeutsche Zeitung, the Guardian revealed that Ian Cameron had helped found the Blairmore investment fund, run from the Bahamas but named after the family’s ancestral home in Aberdeenshire. The fund managed tens of millions of pounds on behalf of wealthy families.

Having avoided detailed questions about his finances for years, Cameron was subsequently forced to admit he and his wife had held shares in Blairmore from 1997 to January 2010. They were sold for a profit of £19,000 shortly before he became prime minister.

As prime minister, Cameron was subject to a more extensive disclosure regime, which would have meant disclosing his ownership of the shares.

The prime minister also had to reveal that his mother, Mary Cameron, had given him two gifts of £100,000 each. He had previously received £300,000 from his late father, leading to questions about whether the family was trying to minimise its inheritance tax bill.

In order to work out the complexities around Blairmore’s tax affairs, Downing Street had to bring in a series of advisers. Cameron also had to admit he did not know whether the £300,000 he inherited from his father had benefited from tax haven status due to part of his estate being based in a unit trust in Jersey. “The fact is we’re utter novices in this world,” notes Oliver.

Cameron’s press secretary, Graeme Wilson, described the “hellish situation” as “driving at 100mph towards a series of brick walls and then swerving at the last second to avoid a crash”.

The Panama Papers revealed hundreds of thousands of companies based in tax havens around the world, enabling wealthy individuals to avoid tax.

Cameron’s involvement with Blairmore led to questioning of his commitment to cleaning up tax secrecy around the world. Cameron insisted he remained determined to resolve issues around tax havens. “Rules have changed, culture has changed,” Cameron said at the time. “And I welcome that. I want to be as clear as I can about the past, about the present, about the future, because frankly, I don’t have anything to hide.”

Cameron resigned less than three months later, announcing his decision to step down the day after the EU referendum.

Oliver’s book also mentions a bizarre anecdote from Davos, the annual financiers’ event at a ski resort in Switzerland. After a series of meetings, Cameron returned to his hotel suite “to discover that [Tony] Blair had used it to meet someone for a nightcap. [Cameron] is understandably bemused,” Oliver reports.

According to Oliver, he and Cameron concluded that “Blair had thought it was OK because it was a British government resource”.

Oliver writes that this surprised Cameron: “I joke that I’m sure he didn’t need to worry too much, ‘though I’m sure he took time and found comfort in the loo’. This is a peculiar line from Blair’s autobiography, which both of us periodically joke about. DC laughs and winces ‘No … please.’”

However, a source close to Tony Blair said that the former Labour leader had not used the hotel suite for a nightcap. Rather Blair had been waiting to meet someone else in the corridor. It is understood that Blair’s police protection decided that rather than have Blair wait in a corridor, it would be best to move him temporarily into Cameron’s suite.