Come back david cameron, all is forgiven! | thearticle

David Cameron’s political career imploded spectacularly and it will be remembered as a dismal failure. Scarcely a year after he confounded pollsters and became the first Tory leader in

twenty-three years to win an outright majority in parliament, he skulked out of Downing Street, leaving behind a divided party and an even more divided country. Yet, after three years of

Theresa May’s hapless premiership and a few weeks of a thoroughly depressing Conservative leadership campaign, would you have him back, if he really, really wanted the top job? I’m pretty

sure I would. Critics portrayed Cameron’s self-confidence as ‘born-to-rule’, Old Etonian entitlement, but, in retrospect at least, it felt rather reassuring to have a prime minister who was

clearly at home in his role. It was debatable how much substance there was beneath the polished surface, but he was positively statesmanlike in comparison to Boris Johnson. You could rely on

Cameron not to bumble incoherently about building model buses from wine boxes, even if he was liable to forget which football team he supported or cut up his hot dog with a knife. He never

compared the UK’s armed forces to the IRA, like Jeremy Hunt in a recent online debate. And, at times of national crisis, he was more likely to be photographed smirking in the back of a

limousine than blubbing Theresa May-style. If you exclude the EU referendum, Cameron’s premiership now seems like a golden era of togetherness, but he managed deep divisions and he did so,

largely, successfully. It wasn’t a trifling matter to hold together a coalition with the Liberal Democrats over a five-year term. Now that political hatred has become a national sport, it’s

easy to forget just how bitterly the two parties’ staff and backbench MPs loathed each other through their years in government. Before Brexit, the most controversial aspects of Cameron’s

time in office involved austerity and welfare reform. There may be different views about whether it was right to reduce spending on public services, but few people would argue that the

deficit should have been allowed to grow unchecked, and, though there are still concerns about the administration of benefits, even Corbyn’s Labour has accepted the thrust of the

government’s welfare reforms. It’s easy to blame Cameron for the divisive impact Brexit has had on the Union, but, for most of his premiership, he governed as a convinced and convincing

unionist. He had no history of offending the Scots, unlike Boris Johnson, whose unpopularity in Scotland makes the independence debate dangerously unpredictable and risks throwing away eight

years of painstaking work by Ruth Davidson, to make the Scottish Conservatives electable there. Before the 2010 election, Cameron forged an imaginative electoral pact with the Ulster

Unionist party, that came within a whisker of returning Northern Irish MPs to a Conservative government and bringing the province’s politics into line with the rest of the UK. After decades

of being treated like the British family’s unwanted cousin, Cameron told Northern Ireland that he would “never be neutral” when it came to defending its Union with Great Britain. Of course,

there were failures, some of them glaring and some rather more subtle. In opposition, Cameron promised a government with small ‘c’ conservative instincts, that would guard the UK’s

institutions carefully and avoid unnecessary, sweeping reforms. The Conservatives’ 2010 manifesto was an understated document that largely shunned grand schemes. This circumspect tone was

partly obliterated by the unfolding financial crisis, but within months of taking office, Tory ministers also introduced a stream of legislative tinkering. The Health and Social Care Act

reorganised the NHS drastically, compounding many of the management problems afflicting the organisation, and some of its key features are still being dismantled. The Conservatives were soon

knee deep in faddish novelties, like police and crime commissioners, fixed five-year parliaments and commitments to turn every school into an academy. Cameron’s first foreign secretary,

William Hague, gave an introductory speech describing a cautious, pragmatic foreign policy, without the military entanglements that marked the Blair-era. Yet, rather than being led by

national interests and rebuilding the expertise and diplomatic skills of the FCO, the Conservatives more or less governed in line with New Labour’s hectoring, black and white view of the

world, cheering on the ‘Arab spring’, then intervening in Libya and Syria. The former prime minister’s career was eventually destroyed by his fondness for trying to kill off persistently

irritating issues by holding referendums. His strategy effectively ended the Lib Dems’ attempts to introduce a proportional voting system and saw off a serious campaign for Scottish

independence. But, after the UK voted to leave the EU, Cameron accepted his defeat with dignity or scarpered, leaving the country in a desperate predicament, depending on your cast of mind.

That miscalculation will be remembered for far longer than his achievements, but his time in office reminds us that things in UK politics weren’t always in a state of permanent crisis. He

was derided, mocked and even hated for much of his time in office, but that is an inevitability for any modern prime minister. Did David Cameron inspire greater confidence than Theresa May

and look other world leaders in the eye as an equal, rather than a supplicant? I think so. Did he act the role of a prime minister more convincingly than Boris Johnson or Jeremy Hunt are

ever likely to manage? Almost certainly. Cameron’s career ended in spectacular farce, with his credibility shredded, but he still looks like a political colossus in comparison to the sorry

lot who have succeeded him.