This is the BBC.

The news headlines this morning, Britain is heading for a hung parliament.

We will stand ready to do all that we can to help bring strong, stable, decisive and good government for our country.

The words and situation are uncannily familiar.

Strong and stable was the projected message.

The context was anything but.

Like Theresa May after the general election last year, in 2010, David Cameron became Prime Minister in a hung parliament.

The first since February 1974.

The response of the two Prime Ministers to their precarious parliamentary situation was strikingly different.

While a wounded Theresa May took some time to patch together a limited deal with the DUP and still struggles with perceptions of weakness and a lack of authority.

In 2010, David Cameron turned a disappointing election result around, forming a formal coalition with the Liberal Democrats with lightning speed.

In this final episode of the camera years, I'll be looking back on his leadership of that coalition government and exploring some of the other seismic events it faced before later returning to the question of Europe and David Cameron's dramatic downfall.

On the steps of Downing Street yesterday evening, I said that Nick and I wanted to put aside party differences and work together in the national interest.

The rosy beginnings of Cameron's partnership with the Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg didn't come about by accident.

Before the 2010 election, Cameron's close ally and policy fixer Oliver Letwin had been following closely the speeches and writings of Clegg and other so-called orange book liberals.

Quite a lot of voters might have backed the Lib Dems in 2010 on the assumption they were to the left of new Labour, astutely Letwin saw common ground with the Conservatives.

I had spent a certain amount of time reading the policy papers of both the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats, which is I find actually politics quite unusual but it's quite frequently people don't read other people's and products.

I think quite an interesting and useful thing to do without that work that it had struck me that the orange book liberal Democrats who essentially, apart from Vince Cable, really were in charge of the Liberal Democrats, were remarkably overlapping with our attitudes, our fundamental attitudes and indeed in some respects, many respects.

Nevertheless, in practice, the coalition required a huge leap from politics as usual, as indicated by Gabby Burton, a close adviser to Cameron from before he became leader to the end of his time in number 10.

Now Baroness Burton, she talked to me in her first major interview since leaving Downing Street.

Well, it was very challenging and certainly nobody had left a handbook on how to do it. And he very much took the view right from the get-go that you had to build consensus and you had to put in a sense of proper governance, actually, otherwise the whole thing would fall apart quite quickly.

And it was built very much on his leadership, you know, he spoke to all of the team and said there will be no briefing against our Liberal Democrats partners.

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