Cameron’s view is echoed in a forthcoming book by Martin Westlake, which shows that not only was an In-Out vote being taken seriously in senior Tory circles nearly 20 years earlier, largely for reasons of party management, but that Cameron felt the referendum was a necessity for the country. In 2013, Cameron cited the main spur as neither migration nor sovereignty but problems in the eurozone, which were “driving fundamental change in Europe”. “Democratic consent for the EU in Britain is now wafer thin,” he said, and needed strengthening.
Cameron has said that populism cost him his job. He also knew that the Remain campaign had been a shambles. The brilliance and cynicism of the Leave campaign left Cameron’s team horribly outgunned. He would be justified in crying foul, but is too knowing a politician not to accept responsibility. His chief regret, surely, will be the failure over many years to advertise the merits of Europe. For a politician who benefitted so much from avoiding policy definition, in a divided Tory Party that would have been asking a lot. Maybe there’s a lesson there.
Just as Cameron’s record has been overshadowed by Brexit, his book will be too. But he takes politics seriously, and there will be plenty for the think tanks, constitutionalists and historians to chew on. There will doubtless be a good deal of explanation and self-justification – on austerity, the coalition, the failure to clean up party funding, the unseating of Gaddafi, the non-intervention in Syria, his frustrations with the Whitehall machine, the non-resolution of press regulation – and I hope he will say something about the 24-hour pressure placed on a PM, the resistance of his party to change and the burdens he placed on himself. For example, he felt he owed it to the victims and to the country to watch in full the videos of jihadist beheadings, at considerable personal discomfort and distress.
The saltier material will be about the personalities. A schoolfriend talks of his sweetness of nature – which essentially he has retained, despite everything – but clearly a number of former colleagues now lie several miles outside his affability zone.
His former friend Steve Hilton is one. The brilliantly creative salesman of compassionate Conservatism let it be known he thought his former boss was too cautious in office. Don’t be surprised to read of Hilton’s increasingly unworldly schemes, high-handedness with colleagues and “eccentric” behaviour.
Lord Ashcroft, a Tory donor to whom William Hague was close, is another who caused Cameron headaches, and who ended up writing a critical biography, with Isabel Oakeshott, of the then PM. The former PM told friends he would have preferred not to mention Ashcroft at all, because almost anything he wrote might cause trouble. But of one thing we can be sure. There will be no admission of Ashcroft’s claim that at a university party Cameron had placed his penis in the mouth of a dead pig (a claim that caused Cameron’s mother to call him at Downing Street – “just checking, David”). The source of the tale has never been revealed. But we can live in hope.
Cameron has delayed publication of this book because he didn’t want to make Theresa May’s job any harder. He knows how difficult the job is, which is why, when she was at the Home Office, he didn’t think she was up to it. But she did replace him, prompting him to say to one friend: “At least it is not Boris.”
Oh dear, and now it is. The Johnson campaign was keen to present its candidate as the One Nation Tory, as the natural home for those who had supported Cameron. In a number of cases it succeeded, but few real Cameroons took the bait. On the other hand, the disdain that for a long time prevented Cameron endorsing Johnson for the London mayoralty has lessened. The two former rivals could now be useful to one another, so don’t expect this book to tell you the whole truth about Cameron’s opinion of Boris.
More likely to receive both barrels is Michael Gove, whose surprise decision to back Leave in the referendum was taken extraordinarily badly by Cameron, who, despite his removal of Gove from the Department of Education, had seen him as a last-ditch ally. The hostility is intensified by the former exceptional closeness between the men’s wives. Cameron is good at magnanimity and disdains small-mindedness, but he may think such generosity of spirit would be wasted on his former ally. He may think damning with little or no praise does the trick.
The people I would like to read most about, though, are Rupert Murdoch, Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson. You will remember that it was Rebekah Brooks who persuaded her boss Murdoch to switch sides and support Cameron’s Tories in the 2010 election. She also persuaded George Osborne and Cameron that her clandestine lover, Coulson, though recently unseated (and later sent to prison) from the editorship of the scandal-hit News of the World, would be a suitable person to run Cameron’s communications.
She would say that, wouldn’t she, you might think. But surely Cameron and his people were savvy enough to do the due diligence? Not due enough, seemingly. In all Cameron’s six years in office, by far his most uncomfortable time in public was his session in front of the Leveson Inquiry, when a pink-faced Prime Minister protested to Sir Brian that he remembered very clearly how important it was to secure an assurance from Coulson. But of what? That he hadn’t known about the hacking, or that it was unlikely to resurface and cause embarrassment?
It would be good to have a fuller and franker account than Cameron has so far offered. Coulson – the tabloid counterweight employed to tell the posh boys what real people think – helped get Cameron into Downing Street. Does Cameron truly regret hiring him, or merely the bad publicity when he was finally exposed? How does Cameron regard Coulson now? And Rebekah Brooks? Are they in touch? She made Cameron look very good and then very stupid. He must have feelings about that.
We are unlikely to read about that, though. Because after slow bidding for the rights to Cameron’s memoirs, the deal was reportedly sealed with a hefty £800,000 offer from HarperCollins, owned by News Corp, whose UK division is News UK. Its chief executive, need I remind you, is Rebekah Brooks.
A version of this article appears in The Gentleman’s Journal. For the Record, by David Cameron, is published by William Collins on 19 September
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SubscribeI shuddered when Neil Ferguson said “China showed the way…” Wow!!!
That is a very telling statement. Parroting CCP and WHO propaganda and in control of the “Doomsday ” model that influences the political decisions. I bet he is on the list for a fat new Chinese research grant.
The nonsense of this situation is that as both doctors said the goal of any restriction was to ensure the health systems did not get overwhelmed. Sweden has done that just as well as the UK. For myself this is the determining factor of the superior strategy of the Swedish approach.
What Neil Ferguson admits in his interview is that in his model there is no accounting for all the people that will die due to the denial of access to “elective diagnostics and procedures”, you know like chemotherapy for cancer or breast screenings or blood analysis for leukaemia. They, the virtuous Elites, term “elective”, which is very deceptive because to someone with those deadly illnesses they are pretty bloody VITAL and not elective.
Further the new deaths and loss of productivity caused by wrecking economies such as suicide, depression, mental illnesses, alcoholism, drug addiction, IPV…. The list goes on and on. The Swedes in their model see this capped at two winters which is about when the 3rd wave and another lockdown will be hitting every other nation.
Here are the known facts from the analysis of the Swedish model: The Swedes take all lumps up front because people less than 50 years continue as normal. People over 50 make a self assessment for partial or full mitigation. The economy takes a modest hit. In all other models two generations get unending austerity to pay back the debt.
Johan Giesecke and the Swedish model is the model of balanced reason. Both Morality and prosperity so the minimum harm is done to the whole society. The other model is the “Snowflake” model that is to be expected by Neo-Marxist SJW Femanazi CULT members who just love their “Virtue” so much they don’t care what it costs because they are positioned never to pay the price. That will be left to the productive middle class again.
We can at this time switch to the Swedish model and mitigate the years of devastation, but this does not fit the requirement of extreme poverty that will support the Globalists agenda. They need you poor and dependent.
This is by far, your best critique on the problem of Chinese Death Flu. Well done indeed. If only Boris Johnson KS, PM, would follow the Swedish model that you so passionately advocate. It is very similar to the rational, sound, intelligent, advice given by Lord Jonathan Sumption, so along ago now.
Sadly we think of Sweden in terms of the Aga and the Volvo, and nothing else!
I absolutely agree that wrapping up an assessment of which expert ot believe in some kind of moral prejudice is not helpful.
But otherwise you seem to be saying that these are extremes opinions that we can’t judge, and that’s not true. Ideally we check their workings and if they haven’t shown them we should discard their opinion, if only to ensure that experts get in the habit of being open and honest. Less ideally, but still founded in evidence, is to check their assumptions against what the data tells us as it comes in.
If we can’t check their workings – if we don’t have the skills ourselves – we can at least survey the experts available rather than relying on whoever the popular press happens to put in front of us. There are experts, after all, who think even Giesecke may be somewhat more pessimistic.
I watched both interviews, and this is quite a good summary of what they were about. I thought Ferguson engaged in a cheap shot when he spoke about Giesecke being willing to just let COVID-19 kill off the older people, when that obviously wasn’t what he was calling for. The Giesecke interview didn’t bring up immigrant communities in Sweden having higher infection rates than the native-born population, but that has been discussed by Anders Tegnell, Giesecke’s successor as state epidemiologist, on April 14. Somali-born people in Sweden, who account for less than one percent of the population, account for almost five percent of the infected, which Tegnell claimed was because “these people have not integrated so well into society”. For UK-Sweden comparisons, it is worth remembering that Somalis have only about a quarter as important in the UK population as they are in the Swedish population. Giesecke said that it was only in April 2021 that one will be able to say which country had the best policy, but I suspect people will be poring over the data to see what it says or make it say what they want it to for years to come.
Interesting – but both scientists, at least as presented here, leave out the possibility of a “second wave” in the autumn or later. The Giesecke seems to think that once this illneess has passed through society, people will have acquired some sort of immunity and that a second wave, if it came at all, would be far less serious. So far, there is no evidence of that – we don’t know how lond antibodies will last,nor do we know how long any immunity will last: a lifetime? Weeks? Months? As to Ferguson, he seems to discount the possibility of immunity unless a vaccine is found. It seems to me that we know so little about this virus that there is no way, yet, to decide which approach was right.
Commentators whose normal field of interest is politics and culture will, of course, use those as their criteria to pick their epidemiologist, as the author correctly states. An article early today in the Guardian looked at “sceptics” as akin to climate denialist – forgetting that climate science is far more settled. The author of this article talks about the “do-gooder class”, a not very positive term. I doubt that either are looking at the issue dispassionately. Entertaining though.
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‘The merits of Europe[sic]’.
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Still waiting to hear.
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