He was the future once.
Legend has it that these are the words with which young pretender David Cameron skewered Prime Minister Tony Blair in the Commons, casting himself in Blair’s image whilst positioning himself as Blair’s inevitable successor. The march of time went on, the inevitability of the future loomed.
Cameron’s future promised, as so many had done (including Blair himself) a new politics. He spelled out what that meant, claiming that he would end the ‘Punch and Judy’ style which characterised the Prime Minister’s Questions process, that he would not oppose the government for the sake of it, that his would be a responsible opposition.
But in reality Cameron was always an irresponsible politician. As my friend Robin Brown has put it in a moving essay on the political climate in the wake of Jo Cox’s tragic death, Cameron was and remains a master of the ‘tactical’, not the strategic in political terms. In his leadership election, he tacked to the right on Europe – a place where he didn’t, and doesn’t, belong – to appease Eurosceptics. Amongst others, this alarmed the Americans. The deal pulling Britain’s MEPs out of the mainstream conservative grouping in the European Parliament left Britain’s Conservative representatives fraternising in Brussels with far-right extremists. This was a classic Cameronian ‘tactical’ move. He bought off the short-term by mortgaging the much-vaunted future. Because, of course that was a long way off. This was a pattern which was to repeat itself.
But from that day on, David Cameron was on the run from the right wing of his own party, and increasingly forces beyond it. He has never stopped running. When Cameron’s novelty wore off and the public began to see the cracks in the ‘call me Dave’ image, the car which followed him to work with his papers behind the environmentally-friendly bike, the aristo in the Bullingdon jacket, not to mention the arrival of Gordon Brown as – momentarily – a Prime Minister who might restore Labour’s fortunes, the right sharpened their knives. And Cameron pandered.
Less than two years after announcing himself in Hereford as a ‘liberal conservative’, Cameron caved in and committed to scrapping the Human Rights Act. A speech in 2007 on immigration was accompanied by a ‘cast iron guarantee’ in the Sun newspaper of a future referendum on forthcoming treaty change in Britain’s relationship with the EU. When the going got tough, Cameron’s liberal conservative credentials got going.
But those things were all in the future. A long way off. Or not so long, as in 2009 Cameron reneged on his cast-iron guarantee over Lisbon, to cries of horror from the Conservative right. On television and in print, he squirmed.
But the Brown government continued to implode, seemingly unable to counter the Conservative narrative that Labour had spent too much, as, they alleged, all Labour governments do, and so Cameron drifted rightward, emphasising fiscal retrenchment and cuts. The fact that Cameron and Osborne had failed to foresee the crisis themselves and had supported the Labour government’s spending plans in another ‘tactical’ move was quickly forgotten, not least because Labour – with Brown in freefall – failed to bother reminding anyone.
But nonetheless Cameron failed to deliver. He didn’t win. The Conservatives were the largest party, but they had no majority and could not govern alone. Notwithstanding initial scepticism (on both sides, as Andrew Adonis has ably documented), a ‘rainbow coalition’ with the Labour Party at its head was just about mathematically possible. The knives sharpened again, until Cameron told the Tory parliamentary party that a deal had been offered by Labour to the Lib Dems over electoral reform (which wasn’t, in fact, the case). The Tories, desperate to end thirteen years in the wilderness gave in. Cameron and Clegg met in the rose garden, and all was forgiven.
Except that it wasn’t. For the next five years in government, Cameron sought to stave off increasingly frenetic attacks from the right wing of the party. The Lib Dems acted as his lightning rod, a convenient fall guy for measures Cameron actually wanted to pursue which his right hated. Nonetheless, meetings and mutterings of the 1922 Committee became more heated, and Cameron was widely blamed for having failed to deliver a majority. Many Tories were disappointed simply because they had been displaced. Lib Dems sat on the front bench in places they had dreamed of occupying. This was All Dave’s Fault. By January 2013 Cameron had been pressured into a commitment for an in-out referendum on Europe should the Conservatives win the 2015 General Election.
But that did not sate the right, within or without the Tory party. UKIP – a party led by a former Conservative, Nigel Farage, surged. In 2014 they won – or at least came first – in the UK European Parliament elections. In August, Douglas Carswell, Conservative MP for Clacton, defected to them. The following month, Mark Reckless, Conservative MP for Rochester and Strood, followed suit. Both resigned their seats and triggered by-elections, which both subsequently won under the UKIP banner. Cameron’s Conservatives were in crisis.
The right pressed home their advantage in the wake of the UKIP surge. Cameron had, as they knew, a track record on breaking promises; in the course of 2013-2015 attempts were made to entrench the referendum pledge in legislation, one at least ostensibly backed by the government. They failed. But the commitment was there in the manifesto, and translated into law following the election, an election Cameron hadn’t expected to win.
Over a decade’s worth of pandering by Cameron had come home to roost. His ‘tactical’ approach to politics finally threatens to be his undoing. When it suited Cameron, even before his party leadership, he was content to stoke the flames of public anger and resentment against the European Union. As the brains trust behind the Conservatives’ infamous dog-whistle ‘are you thinking what we’re thinking?’ manifesto which placed immigration at the heart of its proposals in the wake of the A8 accessions in Eastern Europe, he had form for playing the migrant card in elections.
In 2005 that gamble failed; though Labour’s majority was slashed, the Tories still lost, as they had when they ran a ‘keep the pound’ campaign in 2001. Cameron washed his hands of his manifesto and became a liberal conservative. But it was a place he was always willing to go back to.
Now, with the referendum just days away, Cameron is about to reap the whirlwind of his approach to politics. The office of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom carries with it the burden of statesmanship. That burden has not always been well-handled. Prime Ministers as diverse as Anthony Eden and Tony Blair have erred, grievously, in their decisions regarding Britain’s desired place in the world and how to effect it. And, arguably, Prime Ministers such as Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee have succeeded; the former in demonstrating British resolve and fostering the enthusiasm and energy required to secure national survival, and the latter in mediating the immediate crisis of Britain’s fall from imperial grace.
But it is only now that David Cameron has apparently realised that this ‘existential question’, Britain’s place in the world, is the sina qua non of his office. Until now, he has eschewed that responsibility too often, instead preferring to characterise the world beyond Britain’s borders in whatever terms necessary to secure short-term political gain. This was and is manifestly irresponsible. Defeat for Cameron on Thursday would mark him out as a failed Prime Minister, unworthy of the lineage of Gladstone, Churchill, Attlee or Thatcher. Short-termism, in political leaders most of all, is a vice borne of irresponsibility. Thursday – for all its much more significant implication – will be a final verdict on this most irresponsible of Prime Ministers.
