David Cameron caused the political mess we’re in today – and then he ran away

It may have scarred our UK economy and poisoned our politics for a generation, but at least David Cameron’s Brexit debacle can still provide some moments of dark comedy.

Here’s the latest rib-tickling gag from “Dave”, the man who gambled Britain’s future on his own personal charm: he’s making money giving speeches about how to “lead through disruption”, based on his own management of the EU referendum.

If you happen to be in Calgary, Canada, in late September, you will have the chance to attend the “Energy Disruptors: Unite” conference, a gathering of energy bigwigs. As is often the case with business conferences, the organisers have brought in a star speaker to enlighten the delegates.

Yes, Cameron. And yes, he’s going to Alberta – which is pondering a referendum on leaving Canada – to share his wisdom about how to deal with “major sovereignty votes”.

According to the conference organisers:

“Scotland had an independence vote in 2014 whilst he was prime minister, and obviously, David Cameron also went through Brexit in 2016. He’s going to be talking about his energy track record, but he’s also going to be talking about those two major sovereignty votes and how you lead through disruption and fragmentation when you get really deep political divides.”

To put it mildly, it takes a lot to believe that Cameron can offer useful lessons based on a political and strategic disaster that he caused. Not least because instead of “leading through disruption and fragmentation”, the truth is that he helped cause those things – then ran away rather than face up to his failure or deal with its consequences.

Since the 10th anniversary of Brexit is here, it’s right and important that Cameron’s pivotal role in the whole mess is remembered. Britain has a penchant for nostalgia, fondly rose-tinting our memories of former leaders who are generally allowed to fade into gracious retirement with generous indulgence.

That nostalgia has been amplified by more recent political turmoil. Isn’t the ceaseless churn of hopeless prime ministers enough to make you wish for the relative calm and poise of the Cameron years? After all, he governed for six years, a stint that’s almost unthinkable now, and even managed some cross-party cooperation with Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats. Doesn’t the current permacrisis in UK politics mean that Cameron deserves a mildly positive verdict from posterity?

No. No. Absolutely and definitively no. Cameron should always be remembered as the most consequentially bad prime minister of the postwar era. His name should forever be synonymous with failure. Failure followed by ruinous cowardice.

His preternatural smoothness and his weapons-grade self-assurance are powerful assets in the battle for historical memory. Our feudal history and eternal fixation on class mean that Britain likes a toff, at least when they’re a benign lord-of-the-manor type.

The idea that there are wise and noble people at the top taking care of things is somehow reassuring: how else to explain people watching, and apparently enjoying, stuff like Downton Abbey? Cameron was born to play the part, and his acting skills really are top-notch; he does “charming, decent aristo” better than Hugh Bonneville.

It’s an act, of course. Reportedly, people whisper about how his character changes when the cameras are off, when he becomes the other sort of archetypal toff: high-handed and arrogant.

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That arrogance was the wellspring of his political career and the font of his Brexit disaster. Before he became the Conservative leader in 2005, he was asked at a private dinner why he wanted to become prime minister. “Because I’d be good at it,” he answered with a straight face.

The history of Brexit can be told via a series of moments when Cameron seemed to assume that he could charm people into following his lead, then not minding when he let them down. He won the leadership in 2005 because he made a promise to Conservative Eurosceptics that he would leave the European People’s Party bloc in the European parliament, a promise his rivals David Davis and Liam Fox declined to make because they thought it would raise unrealistic expectations on the right.

First, he ordered the civil service not to prepare for Leave, an act that borders on vandalism. Then, when voters voted for Brexit, he petulantly resigned, leaving a country in desperate need of firm leadership all but rudderless

That set the pattern for Cameron, who spent a decade making ever-grander promises on Europe, all of which ended in failure. In 2007, he made a “cast-iron” promise of a referendum on the EU’s Lisbon Treaty, then abandoned it in 2010. That broken promise helped make Nigel Farage and Ukip part of mainstream politics. The legions of disappointed Tory sceptics it created dogged his government, so he caved in to them and Farage and promised the in/out referendum he’d always said would be a mistake.

He based the vote on another unrealistic promise: that he could use his charm to negotiate reforms and rewrite a new settlement for Britain within the EU. When that act of diplomatic hubris inevitably failed, the referendum became a simple choice between the status quo and “change”, a chance to kick the establishment. The Leave vote was perfectly predictable – a coin toss can only be either heads or tails – but still came as a paralysing shock to the British government, for reasons that were all down to Cameron.

First, he ordered the civil service not to prepare for Leave, an act that borders on vandalism. Then, when voters voted for Brexit, he petulantly resigned, leaving a country in desperate need of firm leadership all but rudderless. A recent study by Nick Bloom of Stanford, using private Bank of England data, calculates that fully half of the economic harm of Brexit was done by the chaotic shock immediately after the referendum vote. That was the period when Cameron, the man in charge, had clocked off to play tennis, pausing only for long enough to give his wife’s stylist, among others, an OBE.

After that, Cameron slid off into a lucrative (but not laborious: hard work is for lesser people) early retirement. You might think that a man born rich and possessed of comfortable homes in the Cotswolds, west London and Cornwall would have enough already, but members of Cameron’s social circle say he still wants more. A Scottish estate where he can swim in the sea and shoot deer – he’s good with a rifle, you know – is the dream, apparently.

The pursuit of money drove him into a grubby spell as a lobbyist for disgraced Australian financier Lex Greensill. Since then, he’s kept a lower profile, but a look at his long entry in the House of Lords register of interests shows that he continues to cash in on his dismal experience as PM. In the last year, there have been 15 paid speeches to banks, and a collection of advisory gigs with private equity, tech and hedge funds. All of which sadly suggests that there are still some customers for his urbane statesman act.

Sometimes the public gets to catch a cameo appearance, too. If you watched the BBC’s recent Brexit: A Very British Civil War, you’d have seen him treading the boards again, purring smoothly through his account of how he threw away the country’s most important economic and diplomatic relationship, all while proclaiming his deep sense of “duty” to the country he failed. Oops, well, I did my best, but these things do happen sometimes, darling. Never mind, eh?

We should mind. We should most definitely mind. To commemorate his role in Brexit, we should put up a statue of Cameron somewhere, then smash it to pieces and display the rubble with a plaque engraved with Shelley’s Ozymandias, a poem that could have been written for him:

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

You were mighty, Dave; briefly the king of kings. Now nothing remains, except the bitter mockery of a country that should always laugh at your failure.