David Cameron

Lest we forget: On 13 July 2016 David Cameron resigned as UK Prime Minister and Leader of the Conservative Party. At the time he stated he would continue to serve his constituents as a humble MP. That dose of humility and resolve lasted almost exactly one month, until 12 September to be precise, when he resigned as an MP with immediate effect and walked away from the malodorous mess of the Cameron years and the Brexit referendum.

Small 'c' conservatives were glad to see him gone and thus happily forgave his rapid exit. Even in the crescendo of incompetence and stupidity that accompanied Theresa May's three years as Prime Minister, no voices were heard regretting that Cameron was no longer there; no one piped up to ask 'why, oh why, did he leave?' – no one. Britain was well shut of him. Good riddance.

He went off to collect directorships and speaking engagements, making up for lost money-making time. It appears that his three years of absence have also been spent – in between his onerous money-making duties – on writing a book, locked out of the house in a 'shepherd's hut' in his garden.

Unfortunately, at the time of his political interment someone forgot to drive the stake through his heart, meaning that now, almost exactly three years after flouncing out for good (or so we hoped, as we nailed the lid down on the casket) he is touring the media, promoting both self and book.

The ghoulish, zombie stare on the cover of the book tells us all we need to know about the arrogant self-regard of the man behind the face; the title, For the Record, affects a level of honesty and self-awareness that is simply not present. Instead of setting out his strategic stall, his book is stuffed full of trivial political gossip.

In office he was a dim failure; as a writer in his shepherd's hut he was also a dim failure and even in his present zombie existence, with the luxury of three years to mull over things, he is still incurably thick, even with hindsight:

If after the referendum we had aimed for a more straightforward partnership Brexit, perhaps along the lines of a Norway or a Switzerland, we could have achieved, I think, a more harmonious and more rapid outcome.

ITV News website

Anyone who has been following the current battle that Switzerland is having in order to avoid its complete subjection to the EU, a subjection that can only be followed by the country's final absorption into that behemoth, can only laugh at the stupidity of that statement.

He displays after all those years in office, after a Brexit campaign and after three years of peace and quiet to think about it all, a total lack of understanding of the nature of the EU. Who can forget the embarrassing foolishness of his couple of days of 'renegotiation' with the EU?

On top of this comes a much more serious lack of strategic understanding of the possible roles of a single nation in an increasingly globalised and networked world.

As the case of Switzerland clearly demonstrates, you're either in the EU or you're out of it.

It is quite shocking that someone who had been in government at the highest level shows so little understanding of the issues. But Cameron never did get it, any of it. Thick as two short planks.

Update 19.09.2019

In his review of Cameron's book, Peter Hitchens defines Cameron's character (or lack of it) well:

None of this makes me warm to Mr Cameron, a PR man without qualities who - on the few awkward occasions when we met - impressed me as a good example of a very interesting caste, Tory in upbringing and wealth, radical or the very least unconservative in personal habits and attitudes, which I had not really understood or met before. These memoirs confirm all my impressions.

The phrase ‘Bourgeois Bohemians’, really an American one, describes them very well. They have all the outward appearance of the comfortably-off privately-educated unshowy classes from whom they are descended and who used to be the backbone of conservative England.

But in their inner hearts they are completely beguiled by modernity. Their personal morality is relaxed, they take illegal drugs without a twinge of worry, they swear in front of women and children, they have a sketchy knowledge of history and a diluted sentimental patriotism which, it seems to me, doesn’t really have any practical application. Religion, for most of them, is a faint background noise. They’ve vaguely heard of Trafalgar, but they don’t know in any detail what happened there or why it matters. They’re not very well up in the classics of English literature and poetry, even when formally well-educated.

Just in case there was any doubt about what a couple of brainless hippies David and Samantha Cameron are, Samantha confirms it in her artless, self-assured way in a soft TV interview when she describes leaving Downing Street:

I was packing up the house, and I was dancing around our kitchen actually. And I had a beer, and a few rollies – it was the weekend!

Assuming that the snooty sounding word 'rollies' refers to what we think it does – for what else could it be? – doesn't she realise that she has just admitted on national television to breaking the law – and in the Prime Minister's residence at that. It's not the breaking the law that grates – millions do that every day – but the brainless sense of entitlement on display in such a carefree admission.