David Cameron has revealed his prostate cancer diagnosis and is pushing for government screening programmes. Photo / Getty Images
David Cameron has revealed that he has been treated for prostate cancer as he called on the Government to introduce screening.
The former prime minister credited his wife Samantha for encouraging him to get tested when he went for a GP check-up in 2024.
He completed a prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test, an MRI scan and then a biopsy, which confirmed the diagnosis.
Cameron, 59, is among many politicians urging ministers to roll out some form of testing to detect cases earlier, when treatment is more likely to succeed.
Revealing his diagnosis for the first time in an interview with The Times, Cameron said: “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.
“I don’t particularly like discussing my personal intimate health issues, but I feel I ought to,” he added.
In 2024, Cameron and his wife were listening to the radio when they heard Nick Jones, the founder of Soho House, explain how a prostate test had successfully picked up his cancer and treated it.
Lady Cameron said: “You’re going for a health check-up with your GP, you should ask about this”.
“And so I did,” he said.
After listening to the interview, he ordered the PSA test, which searches for proteins associated with prostate cancer. It came back with a high PSA score, which he hoped was “probably nothing”.
He told The Times: “You have an MRI scan with a few black marks on it. You think, ‘Ah, that’s probably OK.’ But when the biopsy comes back, and it says you have got prostate cancer?
“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?”
Lord Cameron said he was told about a less intrusive “focal” therapy, which uses needles to deliver electric pulses to destroy the cancerous cells, and successfully undertook the treatment.
The Telegraph is campaigning for the introduction of targeted screening, so that at first those men most at risk – such as black men, those with a family history of prostate cancer or specific genes linked to it – are offered the checks.
The UK National Screening Committee is due to make recommendations on the matter in late November for decisions to be taken by ministers.
During his time in Number 10, Cameron was a vocal supporter of prostate cancer awareness, expressing frustration about his inability to grow a moustache for Movember. His administration established the Cancer Drugs Fund to provide access to drugs not routinely available on the NHS.
He said: “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.”
Cameron added that after his biopsy came back, he faced a choice.
“I had this decision to make, which lots of people with prostate cancer have. Do you watch and wait?
“Or do you look at what the treatment options are? Do I want to take the risk of not acting, or do I want to take the risks of acting?”
His older brother Alexander died at the age Cameron is now, a fact that he said “focuses the mind”.
He said: “It was the same week as Donald Trump was talking about the bomb damage assessment in [the Iranian nuclear plant]. For now… I got my own bomb damage assessment”.
It had been a precision strike.
“It’s all quite close to various important nerves and bits of anatomy. When you see the picture of the bits you need to get rid of, and the bits that are still OK that you don’t? That was a big relief. That was a great moment.”
Cameron said advances in technology have made him more convinced of the benefits of targeted screening.
He said: “I know it’s not a slam dunk. There are respectable arguments against a screening programme.
“You’ve always got to think how many cases do we discover and how many misdiagnoses are there and how many people will be treated unnecessarily. But it seems to me that quite a lot of things have changed over the last few years.”
Rishi Sunak, the most recent Tory Prime Minister, has urged the Government to show leadership and introduce targeted screening, even if the committee is cautious.
He told The Telegraph in October: “I understand it enough that as an elected politician, I would feel comfortable saying, ‘Well, I just want to do this. I’ve gone through the evidence. I’ve made up my own mind’.”
Sunak said elected representatives needed to take responsibility in making their own decisions, not simply rubber-stamping any advice they were given.
“I made decisions like that as Prime Minister all the time, lots of other things where you’re weighing up risk, reward, cost, benefit. I don’t think this is so complex that you couldn’t do that,” he said.
David Lammy, the Deputy Prime Minister, said in October that Labour was “up for the fight”.
Lammy, who has two brothers living with prostate cancer, said momentum was necessary in the campaign for checking those at greatest risk of the disease.
Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, has applauded The Telegraph’s campaign, highlighting this newspaper’s long history of campaigning for better cancer care.
Earlier in 2025, he said: “As a cancer survivor who owes his life to the NHS, I know all too well how important screening is and I would like to see a screening programme in place, but it must be evidence-led.”
The advisory committee has previously rejected screening because of concerns that the unreliability of PSA tests means that too many men are undergoing needless procedures that can cause harm.
But in recent years, the technology used to make a diagnosis has much improved, while treatment has become more targeted.
Men can ask GPs for tests, but many doctors refuse them to those under 50 and surgeries are told not to proactively offer them.
Charities have warned that this situation fuels inequalities, with middle-class men far more likely to seek checks and far higher death rates being prevalent among those in deprived areas.
Black men are twice as likely to get prostate cancer and to die of the disease.
A trial is being launched during November to compare different models of screening, with hopes it could cut deaths from prostate cancer by as much as 40%.
But its start date has been repeatedly delayed, meaning the first results will not be reported for another three years.
Advocates of screening say the NHS should not delay, suggesting the case for targeted checks has been made.
There is concern that the health service is not capable of identifying at-risk groups because of the poor quality of medical records. But recent trials found schemes were able to pinpoint such patients, urging them to come forward for tests.
Currently, around half of cases of prostate cancer are only diagnosed at later stages, when treatment is far less likely to succeed.
The 10-year survival rate is more than 90% for men diagnosed at stages one and two, falling to just 18.6% for those with stage four disease.
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