Cameron is Back!

“Dave is back!” was the comment – partly amused, partly alarmed – across the British media, when Rishi Sunak, the British Prime Minister, appointed David Cameron Foreign Secretary in November 2023. The Financial Times, sardonically, announced, “Cameron, the former premier who accidentally led Britain out of the EU, is back on the political frontline.” (emphasis added).

He is the seventh foreign minister in seven years, having been out of office for seven years, during which time he managed to be involved in the biggest lobbying scandal in recent times: the Greensill scandal – a financial services company whose advisor was Cameron during the Covid emergency. The company went bust, and a parliamentary inquiry found he had shown a “significant lack of judgment.”

Given the low standards of competence exhibited by so many Tory ministers and prime ministers in recent times, was it a move by Sunak to reassure foreign public opinion?

Or, given that Cameron is not a hawk when it comes to the Middle East, is it an attempt to balance the strongly pro-Israeli lobby in Parliament? Cameron had long insisted for a greater humanitarian approach towards Palestinian-occupied territories and, in so doing, demarcated himself from those who simply repeat ad nauseam the official Israeli line. Since the start of the war in Gaza, he declared to be “worried” that Israel was breaking international law, which is more than other ministers have said adding, after meeting in early March, the Israeli minister and former leader of the opposition Benny Gantz, that “Palestinians are facing a devastating and growing humanitarian crisis… I once again pressed Israel to increase the flow of aid. We are still not seeing improvements on the ground. This must change.”

A few years ago, at a lunch with some historians, we discussed, not too seriously, who has been the country’s worst prime minister. Normally the accolade goes to Lord North (PM from 1770 to 1782), remembered today, if at all, as the Prime Minister “who lost America.”

But one should not be too severe: the American colonies would have been lost sooner or later. The other contender for the idiot’s prize is Neville Chamberlain who believed in Hitler’s peaceful intentions. But trying to avoid a war, twenty years after the end of a brutal and terrible one, may have been naive, but understandable.

No such excuses can be proffered for David Cameron. Boris Johnson was obviously a clown, but he was not directly responsible for Brexit – the biggest crisis in post-war British history. Liz Truss was terrible but lasted only fifty days. The Brexit crisis was entirely of Cameron’s own making since relations with the EU had not dramatically changed, nor was there a massive, or even a minor, social movement demanding exit from the EU.

In 2016, he called for a referendum on Europe to resolve internal party strife. He assumed he would win it, that Britain would remain in the EU, and that the Brexiteers in his party would be forced to keep quiet. In other words, he endangered the future of the country for petty internal party politics.

His other main forays in foreign policy have been disastrous. In his memoirs he justified his intervention in Libya (with the French) to prevent Gaddafi “slaughtering his people in Benghazi.” In 2016, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons (set up by Cameron himself) determined “that UK policy in Libya before and since the intervention of March 2011 was founded on erroneous assumptions and an incomplete understanding of the country and the situation.” And who was in charge? David Cameron who, in his memoirs recognized that the outcome was not what he would have liked (a case of typical British understatement). “What we did was right.” Those who suffer the indescribable nightmare that has afflicted Libya should ponder Cameron’s calm philosophy deployed: “Why should we expect modern transition from dictatorship to democracy to be instant and painless?” Actually, most recent transitions have been relatively peaceful: Greece, Portugal, Spain, the USSR, most of Eastern Europe, etc. But Libyans will have just to put up with the consequences of Cameron (and Sarkozy) for more agonizing years.

In 2010, Cameron thought that one of “our biggest missions” was to reassert Britain’s “global” status (of course, the country was not yet an international laughing stock). When Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak was kicked out during the Arab Spring, Cameron immediately started meddling, thinking that Egypt’s future was Britain’s business. He ruled that the Muslim Brotherhood could not be involved in the transition to democracy. Why? Because he did not like them – though Mubarak had, reluctantly, legalized them, aware of the support they enjoyed. The first ever democratic elections in Egypt led to the clear victory of their leader, Mohamed Morsi who was soon replaced by the bloodthirsty dictatorship of General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Cameron’s humanitarian concerns (and those of the rest of the West) evaporated. “Dave” turned quiet about Egypt, no longer a bull in a china shop, but more like a nervous calf who can’t find his mum.

His ascent to power was typical of so many British politicians. He went to Eton, the elite private boarding school (yearly fees today: £46,000). His father had gone there, as did his grandfather, his great-grandfather, and his mother’s father and grandfather. Eton had already produced twenty prime ministers including Robert Walpole (the first Prime Minister of Great Britain), William Pitt, Wellington (of Waterloo fame), Gladstone, Balfour, Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas-Home, Boris Johnson… and “Dave.” After Eton, Cameron went to Oxford, and at the age of 35 he was in parliament, and a few years later he was leader of the opposition.

Though he liked to describe himself as a compassionate conservative, one of the first things Cameron did as a party leader was to take his party out of the conservative group in the European Parliament and to create the “European Conservative and Reformists Group,” which eventually attracted modern and compassionate parties, such as the right-wing Belgian New Flemish Alliance, the Croatian Conservative Party, the far right Greek Solution, the far right Swedish Democrats, Fratelli d’Italia, the Polish Law and Justice, and, more recently, the Spanish far right Vox.

As some observed, “Dave’s idea of strategy is to think about how we get through to Monday.” Ostracized in Europe, he was welcomed in the USA, got to fly on Air Force One with Obama – the first foreign PM to do so. It is clear what Britain’s global role is: in Cameron’s words, it is “to row behind the US” while maintaining, as he writes in his memoirs, that “Britain is the greatest country on earth. Our greatness is derived not from our size, but from our people – their decency, their talent, and that special British spirit.” The main consolation is that he, and the conservative government, are almost certain to lose the next election.