Britain is in chaos and David Cameron is to blame

Illustration: Johannes Leak

A few years ago, David Cameron took delivery of a luxury shepherd’s hut for his Cotswolds garden in West Oxfordshire. The former British prime minister, having left his country in a complete shambles, exiled himself ­inside the small abode, insulated with sheep’s wool and fitted with a wood-fired stove and pullout sofa bed, to write his memoirs.

He would have done himself, and us, a favour if he never came out again. Cameron’s memoir, For the Record, was published ­recently. It is self-indulgent and extraordinarily naive. It serves as a 732-page mea culpa for plunging Britain into political paralysis, ­dividing the country and damaging his party. But the reader is left doubting his sincerity.

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Cameron admits he has many regrets about his time as prime minister (2010-16) and concedes “there are many things I would do differently”. The biggest of all is the EU referendum in 2016. In hindsight, he would have chosen an alternative time for the referendum and managed expectations differently about renegoti­ating EU membership.

David Cameron with his wife Samantha.

He seesaws between apologising and defending his actions on the referendum. It is a tortured logic that, in the end, is unconvincing. What comes across is phony remorse for being the principal cause of the chaos that has enveloped Britain since he left 10 Downing Street.

Those who supported Remain or Leave have every right to feel let down by Cameron. He is marooned politically; neither honoured by his Conservative Party nor respected by the Labour Party or the Liberal Democrats. There is little love from voters. Theresa May is recognised for being resilient and doing her best to navigate through the mess that Cameron left. It is too early to ­definitively judge Boris Johnson.

Cameron mishandled the EU referendum. First, there was no widespread support for a referendum to determine Britain’s membership of the EU. This was simply a party management device to placate Tory Eurosceptics and to limit the leakage of votes to Nigel Farage’s far-right UK Independence Party. Cameron was complacent about the outcome.

Second, he did not hold the ­referendum with the obligation that Leave outline what leaving the EU actually meant. Was it to be a ­negotiated departure or was Britain to crash out without a deal? Did leaving the EU mean ­exiting both the economic and political institutions? None of this was clear. Those who voted Leave in good faith had different expectations.

Then Prime Minister David Cameron (R) with then London Mayor Boris Johnson in 2015.

And third, a direct-democracy referendum runs counter to the principle of representative parliamentary democracy. This is why Brexit has been held up by the parliament. But having decided on a referendum, a supermajority of 60 or 66 per cent for such a monumental decision would have been more sensible. The 51.89 per cent Leave vote means Britain is permanently divided on the EU.

Cameron accepts he did not understand the poison that would be injected into British politics by the referendum. “I did not fully anticipate the strength of feeling that would be unleashed both during the referendum and afterwards, and I am truly sorry to have seen the country I love so much suffer uncertainty and division in the years since then,” he writes.

But then he goes on to defend holding the referendum. “But on the central question of whether it was right to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with the EU and give people the chance to have their say on it, my view remains that this was the right approach to take,” he writes. But the process was flawed with few guidelines on funding and advertising, and even less regulation of them.

He then argues the referendum was unavoidable. “(P)articularly with the Eurozone crisis, the organisation was changing ­before our very eyes, and our ­already precarious place in it was becoming harder to sustain. Renegotiating our position was my ­attempt to address that, and putting the outcome to a public vote was not just fair and not just overdue, but necessary and, I believe, ultimately inevitable.”

Theresa May speaks outside 10 Downing Street in central London in July 2016 following the formal resignation of David Cameron.

But then, recognising he screwed this up and did not foresee the consequences, it is time for another apology. “I know there are those who will never forgive me for holding it, or for failing to deliver the outcome — Britain staying in a reformed EU — that I sought,” he writes. “I deeply ­regret the outcome and accept that my approach failed. The decisions I took contributed to that failure. I failed.”

During the referendum campaign, Cameron stood on the steps of 10 Downing Street and said he would not resign if he lost the case for Remain. “Brits don’t quit,” he said.

But then he did. He ­reveals in the memoir that he ­always planned to resign if he lost. This is an extraordinary admission, but one dropped casually into the book at page 679.

Cameron’s memoir is not all about Brexit. Hundreds of pages describe his upbringing, family, leadership of the Conservative Party, how he grappled with various policy issues and offer reflections on events and personalities. Some of it is quite interesting and well written. But it is overshadowed by Brexit. He divided his country and it remains a mess. That will be his legacy.

When Cameron became leader of the Conservative Party in 2005, led it into a coalition government in 2010 and won a majority of seats in 2015, he had an opportunity to become one of the great British prime ministers. The future was all his. But he stuffed it up big time. His memoir only confirms this. He can retreat to his garden hut but he cannot escape history.