cameron by patten
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Charitably, we should reject the notion that David Cameron’s years as Conservative party leader and UK prime minister simply represented a warm-up act before Boris Johnson deceived and blagged his way to his days at the top. It is, however, inevitable that the reader of these well-written memoirs will begin by comparing the two superficially similar Bullingdon Club boys, who have in their different ways — one mistaken and deceived, the other calculating and mendacious — led the country into what may well be years of divisiveness and relative decline. Looking at intelligence and character, Cameron comes out streets ahead of his one-time friend. Cameron is genuinely clever and hard-working, a “girly swot” according to Johnson. “The Hulk”, as the current prime minister now styles himself, is, according to Cameron, a jealous man “prone to paranoias” that influence his behaviour. As to the overall question of character, Cameron has a real moral compass shown no more clearly than in his and his wife Samantha’s caring for their son Ivan, who suffered from severe epilepsy and cerebral palsy and died aged six. The chapter in For The Record about Ivan is a deeply moving story of parental love. I have always believed that this must have put most political problems into context. What could matter, what could mean as much, as the life and death of this brave little boy. So Cameron, whatever else, is a nice and decent man, though this is clearly not enough to bring success. Join the hunt if you must for Johnson’s moral sensibility. Cameron’s career always gave the impression that he had been born to rule. In a way, that was true. He had from the start not just a silver spoon in his mouth but a whole canteen of hallmarked cutlery. An establishment background of acknowledged “great privilege and wealth” led to Eton and Oxford. David Cameron and Boris Johnson travel on a London Underground train in 2014. In his memoir, the former prime minister heavily criticises Johnson's behaviour and dishonesty during the Leave campaign This “Berkshire boy” possessed charm, intelligence, ambition and luck. In addition, he had what London cabbies would call “the bottle” to make the most of it. While agreeable and normal, what he always seemed to lack was political cunning and good judgment of character and motive. How come his education did not teach him to see through shysters? Sometimes political careers go up like rockets and come down like sticks. Once in parliament, and after three successive Conservative election defeats, Cameron swiftly rose to the party leadership, following three men who had been chosen because of their Eurosceptic or even Europhobic views. In 2005 Cameron won the crown in a contest against the breezy, lazy, incompetent David Davis, partly as a result of a superb, text-free party conference speech, which he tells us he had memorised as it was drafted. Unfortunately for him, he inherited a party that had become increasingly uncomfortable with Britain’s place in the EU. A country that from 1951-73 was at the bottom of the OECD growth table had been granted membership of the then EEC à la carte. Once in the customs union and, later, the single market, the UK grew faster than France, Germany and Italy between 1973 and 2016. But for many Conservatives that was not enough. While, as Douglas Hurd, former foreign secretary, pointed out, the Queen’s head was still on our bank notes and we still went to war at the behest of the US, party activists — ageing and in declining numbers — became increasingly xenophobic. They were egged on by a cabal of “bastards” as John Major called the group of hardline Tory Eurosceptics who plagued his time in office from 1990-97 and ruptured the party. Encouraged in their nationalism by the “Pravdas” of the right — the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail — rightwing partisans embraced anti-Europeanism as the party’s true identity. Like others before him (with some honourable exceptions) Cameron chose to try to manage and, as far as possible, accommodate internal dissent, not take it head on. So every discussion in Brussels turned into a zero-sum game, with muscles flexed and tables banged to cheer up the English nationalists and keep Nigel Farage’s populists at bay. Cameron had worked to stop Conservatives obsessing about Europe. He was intent on modernising and detoxifying the Tory brand. In competently managing the 2010-15 coalition government with the Liberal Democrats, he tried at least to get this done. Take the Europe issue off the table — a big qualification — and he made some progress. The public finances were rebuilt, with spending cuts that were never quite as bad as they sounded. His administration began a long-term reform of education and welfare, though since the latter was in the hands of Iain Duncan Smith it turned into a mess. David Cameron, flanked by Russian President Vladimir Putin and British foreign secretary William Hague, cheers during the judo final at the London 2012 Olympics He also supervised the management of the 2012 London Olympics, a successful celebration of a genuinely “global Britain”. He was probably right about military intervention in Libya and Syria even if others made this difficult or impossible. He legalised gay marriage and helped to lead a successful campaign against Scottish independence, though at times the 2014 referendum was a close-run thing, a fact he acknowledges in an account of a stay at Balmoral with an evidently anxious royal family. Cameron had taken a bold gamble in putting the coalition together with Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, but it worked. However, there was always that same elephant in the room, the Tory party’s growing fixation on the Europe not of reality but of its delusional nightmares about a superstate. Even before the fatal decision to call a referendum, pitching plebiscitary against parliamentary democracy, Cameron had made some awful errors in his European diplomacy. Too rarely trying to make the case for being in the EU at all, in 2006 he withdrew his party’s MEPs from the centre-right European People’s party grouping in the European Parliament. He writes of a need “to get away from the ‘doublespeak’ of the past” that marked the premierships of Thatcher and Major, of railing against Brussels, yet remaining part of a broader integrationist enterprise. Not even Duncan Smith or Michael Howard, his predecessors as party leader, had done this. Cameron was apparently told that this would seal the support of the Europhobes for him. David Cameron with fellow former prime ministers Tony Blair (left) and John Major (right), in Westminster Abbey earlier this month. In his book, Cameron expressed his desire to 'get away from the "double-speak" of the past' This wholly unnecessary decision not only angered Angela Merkel, German chancellor, and other centre-right leaders, it also denied him a source of the political intelligence that might have prevented the embarrassing mistake in 2011 when his crude threats to veto a treaty change on the euro blew up in his face. In recalling this episode, Cameron shows little understanding of the damage that the decision to leave the EPP had on his ability to make friends and create alliances in Europe. Cameron writes that his thinking on Europe and the need for a referendum date back to that time. “Anyone who claims we were bounced, or didn’t give the strategy enough forethought, has their riposte right here.” Yet, his apologia for holding the 2016 Brexit vote begins by confusing the pressure from rightwing Conservatives and Farage’s UK Independence party with national enthusiasm for a European referendum. In the weeks before the 2015 general election, which unexpectedly delivered a Tory majority, Europe ranked seventh in the list of voters’ concerns. The idea that winning a referendum to remain in the EU would see off Farage and Tory Brexiters was wrong. They would have cried foul and come back for another go, and then another and another. Moreover, Cameron’s behaviour stretched voters’ credulity. He had rarely had a good word to say about Europe. Indeed there are occasions in the book when it’s not unreasonable to wonder how much he actually knew or cared about the EU. He announced that he would get a fundamental renegotiation of our membership. He came home with peanuts and then said that it would be a disaster if we were to leave the EU of which he had been so critical. The referendum campaign itself should not have been run from Downing Street. The case against leaving was put almost entirely in terms of bleak economic forecasts. On top of this, much of the press was hostile. Cameron writes that he tried to convince Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail (whom he thought had admired his ruthlessness), to stop attacking him. This of course failed as did a personal plea to the Mail’s proprietor, Lord Rothermere, who claimed he was against Brexit. Cameron rightly criticises the BBC’s craven judgment about what constituted balance in its news coverage. David Cameron speaks in April 2016 to staff at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Birmingham during the EU referendum campaign Then there was, of course, the lying and the disloyalty of Michael Gove, Johnson and their Leave colleagues. Cameron correctly savages their behaviour, particularly that of his one-time close friend Gove — the intellectual morphed into arch-populist — who turned out to be not much of a friend of the prime minister but rather the toxic Dominic Cummings’s glove puppet. Cameron accuses Gove of “getting his hands dirty again and again” during the campaign. Whatever else, Cameron does not seem to have made a great success of picking his friends. But as the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski said: “In politics, being deceived is no excuse.” For Anthony Eden, the Suez Canal always flowed through his drawing room; for Cameron, the referendum will always stand balefully on the mantelpiece. It was bad luck after his probably inevitable departure that his successor Theresa May, finding herself in a deep hole, concluded that the sensible thing to do was to dig even deeper. She interpreted the Leave vote far more crudely than most Brexit campaigners had done. She was public spirited but that was about it. So Cameron’s memoirs are the record of how one huge egregious error, seeded and nurtured by the rightwing of his party, produced a result that will split, demoralise and weaken Britain for years ahead, in the process confirming for many the view that Conservatives are the nasty party. The historian Peter Hennessy recently argued that the UK’s system of governance ultimately depends on what a distinguished civil servant used to call the “good chaps” theory, namely, that most members of our governing class know where the undrawn lines of the constitution are and carefully avoid crossing them or going anywhere near doing so. They certainly do not, as the former UK supreme court justice, Lord Sumption, has said about the present administration, take “a hammer and sickle” to our political culture. Cameron was a “good chap”, betrayed and deceived by “bad chaps”. Today these are the people who run Britain.
https://www.ft.com/content/5406e30c-da2c-11e9-9c26-419d783e10e8
Charitably, we should reject the notion that David Cameron’s years as Conservative party leader and UK prime minister simply represented a warm-up act before Boris Johnson deceived and blagged his way to his days at the top. It is, however, inevitable that the reader of these well-written memoirs will begin by comparing the two superficially similar Bullingdon Club boys, who have in their different ways — one mistaken and deceived, the other calculating and mendacious — led the country into what may well be years of divisiveness and relative decline. Looking at intelligence and character, Cameron comes out streets ahead of his one-time friend. Cameron is genuinely clever and hard-working, a “girly swot” according to Johnson. “The Hulk”, as the current prime minister now styles himself, is, according to Cameron, a jealous man “prone to paranoias” that influence his behaviour. As to the overall question of character, Cameron has a real moral compass shown no more clearly than in his and his wife Samantha’s caring for their son Ivan, who suffered from severe epilepsy and cerebral palsy and died aged six. The chapter in For The Record about Ivan is a deeply moving story of parental love. I have always believed that this must have put most political problems into context. What could matter, what could mean as much, as the life and death of this brave little boy. So Cameron, whatever else, is a nice and decent man, though this is clearly not enough to bring success. Join the hunt if you must for Johnson’s moral sensibility. Cameron’s career always gave the impression that he had been born to rule. In a way, that was true. He had from the start not just a silver spoon in his mouth but a whole canteen of hallmarked cutlery. An establishment background of acknowledged “great privilege and wealth” led to Eton and Oxford. David Cameron and Boris Johnson travel on a London Underground train in 2014. In his memoir, the former prime minister heavily criticises Johnson's behaviour and dishonesty during the Leave campaign This “Berkshire boy” possessed charm, intelligence, ambition and luck. In addition, he had what London cabbies would call “the bottle” to make the most of it. While agreeable and normal, what he always seemed to lack was political cunning and good judgment of character and motive. How come his education did not teach him to see through shysters? Sometimes political careers go up like rockets and come down like sticks. Once in parliament, and after three successive Conservative election defeats, Cameron swiftly rose to the party leadership, following three men who had been chosen because of their Eurosceptic or even Europhobic views. In 2005 Cameron won the crown in a contest against the breezy, lazy, incompetent David Davis, partly as a result of a superb, text-free party conference speech, which he tells us he had memorised as it was drafted. Unfortunately for him, he inherited a party that had become increasingly uncomfortable with Britain’s place in the EU. A country that from 1951-73 was at the bottom of the OECD growth table had been granted membership of the then EEC à la carte. Once in the customs union and, later, the single market, the UK grew faster than France, Germany and Italy between 1973 and 2016. But for many Conservatives that was not enough. While, as Douglas Hurd, former foreign secretary, pointed out, the Queen’s head was still on our bank notes and we still went to war at the behest of the US, party activists — ageing and in declining numbers — became increasingly xenophobic. They were egged on by a cabal of “bastards” as John Major called the group of hardline Tory Eurosceptics who plagued his time in office from 1990-97 and ruptured the party. Encouraged in their nationalism by the “Pravdas” of the right — the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail — rightwing partisans embraced anti-Europeanism as the party’s true identity. Like others before him (with some honourable exceptions) Cameron chose to try to manage and, as far as possible, accommodate internal dissent, not take it head on. So every discussion in Brussels turned into a zero-sum game, with muscles flexed and tables banged to cheer up the English nationalists and keep Nigel Farage’s populists at bay. Cameron had worked to stop Conservatives obsessing about Europe. He was intent on modernising and detoxifying the Tory brand. In competently managing the 2010-15 coalition government with the Liberal Democrats, he tried at least to get this done. Take the Europe issue off the table — a big qualification — and he made some progress. The public finances were rebuilt, with spending cuts that were never quite as bad as they sounded. His administration began a long-term reform of education and welfare, though since the latter was in the hands of Iain Duncan Smith it turned into a mess. David Cameron, flanked by Russian President Vladimir Putin and British foreign secretary William Hague, cheers during the judo final at the London 2012 Olympics He also supervised the management of the 2012 London Olympics, a successful celebration of a genuinely “global Britain”. He was probably right about military intervention in Libya and Syria even if others made this difficult or impossible. He legalised gay marriage and helped to lead a successful campaign against Scottish independence, though at times the 2014 referendum was a close-run thing, a fact he acknowledges in an account of a stay at Balmoral with an evidently anxious royal family. Cameron had taken a bold gamble in putting the coalition together with Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, but it worked. However, there was always that same elephant in the room, the Tory party’s growing fixation on the Europe not of reality but of its delusional nightmares about a superstate. Even before the fatal decision to call a referendum, pitching plebiscitary against parliamentary democracy, Cameron had made some awful errors in his European diplomacy. Too rarely trying to make the case for being in the EU at all, in 2006 he withdrew his party’s MEPs from the centre-right European People’s party grouping in the European Parliament. He writes of a need “to get away from the ‘doublespeak’ of the past” that marked the premierships of Thatcher and Major, of railing against Brussels, yet remaining part of a broader integrationist enterprise. Not even Duncan Smith or Michael Howard, his predecessors as party leader, had done this. Cameron was apparently told that this would seal the support of the Europhobes for him. David Cameron with fellow former prime ministers Tony Blair (left) and John Major (right), in Westminster Abbey earlier this month. In his book, Cameron expressed his desire to 'get away from the "double-speak" of the past' This wholly unnecessary decision not only angered Angela Merkel, German chancellor, and other centre-right leaders, it also denied him a source of the political intelligence that might have prevented the embarrassing mistake in 2011 when his crude threats to veto a treaty change on the euro blew up in his face. In recalling this episode, Cameron shows little understanding of the damage that the decision to leave the EPP had on his ability to make friends and create alliances in Europe. Cameron writes that his thinking on Europe and the need for a referendum date back to that time. “Anyone who claims we were bounced, or didn’t give the strategy enough forethought, has their riposte right here.” Yet, his apologia for holding the 2016 Brexit vote begins by confusing the pressure from rightwing Conservatives and Farage’s UK Independence party with national enthusiasm for a European referendum. In the weeks before the 2015 general election, which unexpectedly delivered a Tory majority, Europe ranked seventh in the list of voters’ concerns. The idea that winning a referendum to remain in the EU would see off Farage and Tory Brexiters was wrong. They would have cried foul and come back for another go, and then another and another. Moreover, Cameron’s behaviour stretched voters’ credulity. He had rarely had a good word to say about Europe. Indeed there are occasions in the book when it’s not unreasonable to wonder how much he actually knew or cared about the EU. He announced that he would get a fundamental renegotiation of our membership. He came home with peanuts and then said that it would be a disaster if we were to leave the EU of which he had been so critical. The referendum campaign itself should not have been run from Downing Street. The case against leaving was put almost entirely in terms of bleak economic forecasts. On top of this, much of the press was hostile. Cameron writes that he tried to convince Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail (whom he thought had admired his ruthlessness), to stop attacking him. This of course failed as did a personal plea to the Mail’s proprietor, Lord Rothermere, who claimed he was against Brexit. Cameron rightly criticises the BBC’s craven judgment about what constituted balance in its news coverage. David Cameron speaks in April 2016 to staff at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Birmingham during the EU referendum campaign Then there was, of course, the lying and the disloyalty of Michael Gove, Johnson and their Leave colleagues. Cameron correctly savages their behaviour, particularly that of his one-time close friend Gove — the intellectual morphed into arch-populist — who turned out to be not much of a friend of the prime minister but rather the toxic Dominic Cummings’s glove puppet. Cameron accuses Gove of “getting his hands dirty again and again” during the campaign. Whatever else, Cameron does not seem to have made a great success of picking his friends. But as the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski said: “In politics, being deceived is no excuse.” For Anthony Eden, the Suez Canal always flowed through his drawing room; for Cameron, the referendum will always stand balefully on the mantelpiece. It was bad luck after his probably inevitable departure that his successor Theresa May, finding herself in a deep hole, concluded that the sensible thing to do was to dig even deeper. She interpreted the Leave vote far more crudely than most Brexit campaigners had done. She was public spirited but that was about it. So Cameron’s memoirs are the record of how one huge egregious error, seeded and nurtured by the rightwing of his party, produced a result that will split, demoralise and weaken Britain for years ahead, in the process confirming for many the view that Conservatives are the nasty party. The historian Peter Hennessy recently argued that the UK’s system of governance ultimately depends on what a distinguished civil servant used to call the “good chaps” theory, namely, that most members of our governing class know where the undrawn lines of the constitution are and carefully avoid crossing them or going anywhere near doing so. They certainly do not, as the former UK supreme court justice, Lord Sumption, has said about the present administration, take “a hammer and sickle” to our political culture. Cameron was a “good chap”, betrayed and deceived by “bad chaps”. Today these are the people who run Britain.
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