Former prime minister Lord Cameron has revealed he has been treated for prostate cancer.
The former Tory leader, who was PM from 2010 until 2016, and foreign secretary from November 2023 until last year’s general election, went public in an interview with The Times.
The 59-year-old joins Olympic cycling champion Sir Chris Hoy, ex-Sky News presenter Dermot Murnaghan and another former PM, Rishi Sunak, in campaigning for better diagnosis and treatment.
He has now had the all clear and is cancer-free.
Lord Cameron went to the GP for a prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test – which looks for proteins associated with prostate cancer – after his wife Samantha urged him to make an appointment. His result showed his numbers were worryingly high.
Recalling the moment when, after a follow-up biopsy, he was told he had cancer, Lord Cameron said: “You always dread hearing those words.
“And then literally as they’re coming out of the doctor’s mouth you’re thinking, ‘Oh, no, he’s going to say it. He’s going to say it. Oh God, he said it’. Then came the next decision. Do you get treatment? Or do you watch and wait?”
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Lord Cameron said his older brother Alexander died of pancreatic cancer at the same age he is now. “It focuses the mind,” he said. “I decided quite quickly. I wanted to move ahead and that’s what I did.”
The former prime minister opted to have focal therapy, a treatment which delivers electric pulses via needles to destroy the cancerous cells.
He was given a post-treatment MRI scan around the time the US struck a nuclear plant in Iran last year. “It was the same week as Donald Trump was talking about the bomb damage assessment… I got my own bomb damage assessment,” he quipped.
Explaining why he has shared his diagnosis, Lord Cameron said: “I’ve got a platform. This is something we’ve really got to think about, talk about, and if necessary, act on.
“I want to, as it were, come out. I want to add my name to the long list of people calling for a targeted screening programme.”
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Lord Cameron is backing a call by the charity Prostate Cancer Research for the introduction of screening for men at high risk of the disease.
“I don’t particularly like discussing my personal intimate health issues, but I feel I ought to,” he continued. “Let’s be honest. Men are not very good at talking about their health. We tend to put things off.
“We’re embarrassed to talk about something like the prostate, because it’s so intricately connected with sexual health and everything else. I sort of thought, well, this has happened to you, and you should lend your voice to it.
“I would feel bad if I didn’t come forward and say that I’ve had this experience. I had a scan. It helped me discover something that was wrong. It gave me the chance to deal with it.”
Approximately 12,000 men in the UK die from prostate cancer every year, making it the country’s biggest male cancer.
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An ongoing trial is looking at how healthcare professionals could use PSA tests with other assessments to improve screening.
Lord Cameron’s interview comes ahead of a meeting on Thursday, which could see the National Screening Committee give the green light for the first NHS screening programme for prostate cancer.
