I had practically finished this review of David Cameron’s long-delayed autobiography when the Supreme Court delivered its verdict on his successor Boris Johnson’s prorogation of Parliament.
Sitting in a hotel at the Labour Party Conference when the judgment came on the television, people cheered as Britain’s highest court declared a British prime minister had advised a British monarch to break the law. Not for the first time, people were quick to revive a now-infamous tweet from spring 2015. In it, David Cameron said British voters, just days away from a general election, faced “a simple and inescapable choice – stability and strong Government with me, or chaos with Ed Miliband”.
For some reason, that tweet has yet to be deleted. It lives on in an ironic half-life, existing to be shared by users in stunned derision each time Britain descends into a previously unthinkable level of political and constitutional chaos.
Many of the people sharing the tweet do so in spirit of profound anger at Cameron, others simply in awe that a prediction could have proven so earth-shatteringly wrong. It is the latter spirit in which this book is written, since Cameron appears as stunned as anyone at what has happened to the country he led until three years ago.
At several points in this book Cameron uses the term “British” as a synonym for decency and restraint. When he is caught smoking cannabis at Eton, his father’s “very British” way of handling it is to delay confronting the issue. The aged Queen and Duke of Edinburgh display “profoundly British” patience when enduring interminable commemoration of her Diamond Jubilee in the midst of “profoundly British weather”.
Perhaps the defining realisation of this book is that Cameron’s conception of Britain and Britishness were incomplete, at best. Early on, he describes his then-putative coalition partner Nick Clegg as “a reasonable, rational, decent guy”.
These qualities of moderation and reasonableness are prized by Cameron and set against that which is deemed to be “bonkers”, and often emanates from the unreformed right wing of his own party. The book is marbled with tales of frustration and often undisguised scorn for the Neanderthal tendency in his own party – of which the examples are legion, some comic, others unpleasant.
After the publication of the Savile report into Bloody Sunday, and Cameron’s honourable apology in the Commons, ex-Territorial SAS man and future failed Brexit negotiator David Davis tried to stir up ex-servicemen on the Tory backbenches to oppose it.
At one point, Cameron quotes his deputy chief of staff Kate Fall telling him: “These people will never love you; they will tolerate you because you are good and you can win.”
Like many Conservatives – like many professional politicians of all stripes – he is wont to mistake his party for the country at large. At one level this is ironic, given the priority Cameron placed on making his party more reflective of modern Britain.
But there is an unresolved tension at the heart of his leadership of his party, his premiership, and indeed this book. Was the “modernisation” project about making his party a little more like Britain, or simply about making Britain like his party a little more?
Cameron became leader in 2005 after his party’s longest uninterrupted stretch of failure. The Tories had lost three successive elections to Tony Blair. These were heavy losses, unarguable rejections by the electorate of a party that, as Cameron repeatedly points out in this book, was too white, upper-middle class, male and rural. In short, too like him. Cue his initial attempts at positioning himself as modern, beginning with the revolutionary act of having smoothies at his leadership launch, and having said launch in a “bright and open space” rather than the “oak panelled rooms” used by his rivals for the leadership.
But Cameron himself was a product of these oak-panelled rooms. He first worked for a Tory MP (who was also his godfather) as a teenager, then joined the party’s central office straight out of Oxford. He progressed from there to being a special advisor to Cabinet ministers. He worked at both the treasury and home office long before he was 30.
He was, and is, a Tory by inclination, class, temperament and virtually every other indicator; as this book demonstrates. If his aim was to change the Conservative Party, that change was about preserving the party, and its dominance of UK politics. His leadership slogan was literally “Change to Win”.
Which leads, inevitably, to Europe. Cameron himself was a Eurosceptic, though both in this book and associated media interviews, he expresses sincere surprise at the “latent Leaver gene” which his decision to call a referendum awoke.
Though he shares membership of the Tory tribe with the most hardline Eurosceptics – and instinctively harrumphs at the excesses of “bloody Brussels” – his passion for what he sees as British reasonableness means he simply cannot conceive of psychological depths of Euro-hatred. Which may be why he first indulged it, then found it impossible to fight.
Before his milestone Bloomberg speech in 2013 promising a referendum, he recounts inviting two of the most ideological Brexiters (though that word had yet to be invented) to discuss how to resolve party tensions on Europe. But rather than make practical suggestions, Owen Patterson and Iain Duncan Smith sit in Cameron’s Downing Street flat and become ever more florid in their denunciations of Europe, relieved only when the prime minister spots a mouse and throws an empty wine bottle at it.
All of which begs the question: why was this tendency indulged and not confronted? Why, having pledged to make his Tory leadership and premiership explicitly not about Europe – was a referendum promised? The answers offered in this book are unconvincing.
It had been four decades since the British people had had a say (in the 1975 referendum) was one argument offered. But that was undermined by the truth that most voters didn’t really care. When pollsters asked, Europe was routinely far down the list of concerns expressed.
Cameron makes much of the first Eurozone bailout (which he vetoed in December 2011) and his concern that EU treaties would be used to drive through further political integration needed to manage the single currency. Leaving aside the fact that this fear has mostly not been borne out – despite the urgings of Emanuel Macron – calling a simple in-out referendum on the basis of a complicated renegotiation, after years of public scorn towards Europe from his party, was not a plan for success.
By the end of the referendum campaign, Cameron had himself become more convinced than most of the futility of leaving the decision-making table of your largest market. I remember his comments on a final op-ed article I wrote for him about the benefits of the Single Market, scrawled on with passion and in anger at the uneconomic arguments and distortions of the Leave campaign.
But by then it was too late, the party he was still trying to preserve through reasonableness had set itself alight and is today still burning both itself and the UK. It should be said that it is a decent book – whatever one's politics, Cameron gives a fluent and interesting account of his premiership – just as the author is a decent man. A decent man staring at an inferno, wondering how it could possibly have got to this.
Matthew O'Toole is a former No 10 Downing St Brexit spokesperson. He now works for communications agency Powerscourt and writes about politics
