Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in the context of "Second Cameron Ministry"

David Cameron's tenure as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom began on 11 May 2010 when he accepted an invitation of Queen Elizabeth II to form a government, succeeding Gordon Brown of the Labour Party, and ended on 13 July 2016 upon his resignation following the 2016 referendum that favoured Brexit, which he had opposed. As prime minister, Cameron also served simultaneously as First Lord of the Treasury, Minister for the Civil Service, and Leader of the Conservative Party.

Following the 2010 general election, Cameron became prime minister at the head of a coalition government between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, as no party had gained an overall majority in the House of Commons for the first time since the February 1974 general election. He appointed Nick Clegg, Leader of the Liberal Democrats, Deputy Prime Minister. Between them, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats controlled 363 seats in the House of Commons, with a majority of 76 seats.

The Cameron–Clegg coalition was formed by David Cameron and Nick Clegg when Cameron was invited by Queen Elizabeth II to form a new government, following the resignation of Prime Minister Gordon Brown on 11 May 2010, after the general election on 6 May. It was the UK's first coalition government since the Churchill war ministry ended in 1945.

The coalition was led by Cameron as prime minister with Clegg as deputy prime minister and composed of members of both Cameron's centre-right Conservative Party and Clegg's centrist Liberal Democrats. The Cabinet was made up of sixteen Conservatives and five Liberal Democrats, with eight other Conservatives and one other Liberal Democrat attending cabinet but not members. The coalition was succeeded by the single-party, second Cameron ministry following the 2015 election.

The Liberal Democrats, colloquially known as the Lib Dems, is one of the major political parties in the United Kingdom. Ideologically adhering to liberalism, it was founded in 1988. The party is based at Liberal Democrat Headquarters, which since September 2025 has been based at Buckingham Gate, in the Westminster area of Central London. The party's leader is Ed Davey. It is the third-largest party in the United Kingdom, with 72 members of Parliament (MPs) in the House of Commons. It has 75 members of the House of Lords, 5 in the Scottish Parliament, 1 in the Welsh Senedd, and around 3,200 local council seats. The party holds a twice yearly Liberal Democrat Conference, at which policy is formulated. In contrast to its main opponents, the Lib Dems grant all members attending Conference the right to vote on policy, under a one member, one vote system. As well as voting in the Conference Hall, the party allows its members to vote online for its policies and leadership elections. Members are also free to join organisations representing strands of party thinking, such as Liberal Reform and Social Liberal Forum, and for those under 30 years, Young Liberals.

In 1981, an electoral alliance was established between the Liberal Party, a group which descended from the 18th-century Whigs, and the Social Democratic Party (SDP), a splinter group from the Labour Party. In 1988, the parties merged as the Social and Liberal Democrats, adopting their present name a year later. Under the leaderships of Paddy Ashdown and Charles Kennedy, the party grew in the 1990s and 2000s, focusing its campaigns on specific seats and retained the third-largest party status in the House of Commons, although with significantly more seats than the predecessor Liberal Party. In the 1997 election, the Liberal Democrats doubled their seat count to 46. In 2010, under Nick Clegg's leadership, the Lib Dems were junior partners in the Conservative-led coalition government, in which Clegg served as deputy prime minister. Though it allowed the party to implement some of its policies, the coalition damaged its electoral standing; it lost 48 of its 56 MPs at the 2015 general election, which relegated it to fourth-largest party in the House of Commons. Under the leaderships of Tim Farron, Vince Cable and Jo Swinson, the party refocused as a pro-Europeanist party opposing Brexit. In the 2019 general election, the party garnered 11.5% of the vote on an anti-Brexit platform, but this did not translate into seat gains. However, the party's success was renewed under the leadership of Ed Davey, winning hundreds of councillors and 72 MPs in the 2024 general election, its highest result since 1923, and resuming its status as the third largest party in the House of Commons.

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) is a ministerial department of the Government of the United Kingdom. It is headed by the Secretary of State for Justice, an office held concurrently by the Lord Chancellor. Its stated priorities are to reduce re-offending and protect the public, to provide access to justice, to increase confidence in the justice system, and to uphold people's civil liberties. The Secretary of State is the minister responsible to Parliament for the judiciary, the court system, prisons, and probation in England and Wales, with some additional UK-wide responsibilities, e.g., the UK Supreme Court and judicial appointments by the Crown. The department is also responsible for areas of constitutional policy not transferred in 2010 to the Deputy Prime Minister, human rights law, and information rights law across the UK.

The British Ministry of Justice may also oversee the administration of justice in Jersey, Guernsey, and the Isle of Man (which are Crown Dependencies), as well as Saint Helena, Ascension, Tristan da Cunha, and the Falkland Islands (which are British Overseas Territories). Gibraltar, another British overseas territory, has its own Ministry of Justice.

The Churchill war ministry was the United Kingdom's unity coalition government for most of the Second World War from 10 May 1940 to 23 May 1945. It was led by Winston Churchill, who was appointed prime minister of the United Kingdom by King George VI following the resignation of Neville Chamberlain in the aftermath of the Norway Debate.

At the outset, Churchill formed a five-man war cabinet which included Chamberlain as Lord President of the Council, Clement Attlee as Lord Privy Seal and later as Deputy Prime Minister, Viscount Halifax as Foreign Secretary, and Arthur Greenwood as a minister without portfolio. Although the original war cabinet was limited to five members, in practice they were augmented by the service chiefs and ministers who attended the majority of meetings. The cabinet changed in size and membership as the war progressed but there were significant additions later in 1940 when it was increased to eight after Churchill, Attlee, and Greenwood were joined by Ernest Bevin as Minister of Labour and National Service; Anthony Eden as Foreign Secretary, replacing Halifax who was sent to Washington as Ambassador to the United States; Lord Beaverbrook as Minister of Aircraft Production; Sir Kingsley Wood as Chancellor of the Exchequer; and Sir John Anderson as Lord President of the Council, replacing Chamberlain who died in November (Anderson later became chancellor following Wood's death in September 1943).

Clement Richard Attlee, 1st Earl Attlee (3 January 1883 – 8 October 1967), was a British statesman who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1945 to 1951 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1935 to 1955. Attlee was Deputy Prime Minister during the wartime coalition government under Winston Churchill, and Leader of the Opposition on three occasions: from 1935 to 1940, briefly in 1945 and from 1951 to 1955. He remains the longest serving Labour leader.

Attlee was born into an upper middle class family, the son of a wealthy London solicitor. After attending Haileybury College and the University of Oxford, he practised as a barrister. The volunteer work he carried out in London's East End exposed him to poverty, and his political views shifted leftwards thereafter. He joined the Independent Labour Party, gave up his legal career, and began lecturing at the London School of Economics; with his work briefly interrupted by service as an officer in the First World War. In 1919, he became mayor of Stepney and in 1922 was elected to Parliament as the Member for Limehouse. Attlee served in the first Labour minority government led by Ramsay MacDonald in 1924, and then joined the Cabinet during MacDonald's second minority (1929–1931). After retaining his seat in Labour's landslide defeat of 1931, he became the party's Deputy Leader. Elected Leader of the Labour Party in 1935, and at first advocating pacificism and opposing re-armament, he became a critic of Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasement in the lead-up to the Second World War. Attlee took Labour into the wartime coalition government in 1940 and served under Winston Churchill, initially as Lord Privy Seal and then as deputy prime minister from 1942.

Sir Nicholas William Peter Clegg (born 7 January 1967) is a British retired politician and media executive who served as Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2010 to 2015 and as Leader of the Liberal Democrats from 2007 to 2015. He was Member of Parliament (MP) for Sheffield Hallam from 2005 to 2017. An "Orange Book" liberal, he has been associated with both socially liberal and economically liberal policies.

Born in Buckinghamshire, Clegg was educated at Westminster School before going on to study at the University of Cambridge, University of Minnesota and College of Europe. He worked as a journalist for the Financial Times before becoming a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) in 1999. After his election to the House of Commons in 2005, Clegg served in a variety of leadership roles in the Liberal Democrats, most notably as spokesperson for Home Affairs, before being elected to succeed Menzies Campbell as party leader in 2007. During his tenure as leader, Clegg said that the Liberal Democrats had transcended left and right-wing politics and described the party as radical centrist. He supported reduced taxes, electoral reform, cuts on defence spending and an increased focus on environmental issues.