David Cameron should stop beating himself up

In the run-up to the Scottish referendum of 2014 I was sitting in the House of Commons café area at Portcullis House, chatting to a friend from the BBC in Scotland and generally minding my own business. We were discussing some aspect of David Cameron’s premiership when my colleague told me to look up. I could, he said, ask the man himself. Cameron strode over, breaking out of the little procession of power, leaving advisers and bag carriers in his wake, to make a point about the campaign to keep Scotland in the United Kingdom.

Among pro-Union commentators and journalists there had been, said Cameron, a lot of stuff which suggested that he was lax and devoting insufficient attention to winning the vote triggered by his decision to accede to Nationalist demands for a referendum that autumn. Unionists needed to be assured – he said – that in 2014 for him, as PM, there was no higher priority than keeping Scotland as part of the UK.

At various points in Cameron’s leadership I had been critical, as a newspaper columnist, of his decisions. But on Scotland I had written just a few days before that Cameron had, in strategic terms, played a blinder, that is on this he was making sensible decisions and doing well.

The Prime Minister looked taken aback to hear that I had praised him on something, on anything. He hadn’t seen that article, he indicated. There was so much journalism these days and so much to read that eventually it all – criticism, praise – blurred into one, he said.

That’s perfectly true, and I remember laughing, but as a remark (you journalists and your articles all blur into one) it is still, probably, not the wisest thing for a party leader to say to a journalist.

I mention the encounter because it stuck in my mind as typical Cameron. The former Tory leader making a quick-witted joke, taking a rare compliment and then flippantly and amusingly discarding it, leaving a faint impression of carelessness in the perception created. That theme – a tendency for Cameron at times to misread people, or even worse at times to fatally misunderstand their motives – runs through For the Record, the highly entertaining and well-crafted account of his life and career, published earlier this month. The second part of the BBC documentary on “The Cameron Years” aired this week.

In For the Record Cameron seems most baffled and hurt when Michael Gove decides to campaign for the Leave side in the 2016 referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. His decision was preceded by Cameron and George Osborne getting Gove into Number 10 and trying to persuade him not to be so silly.

“Michael seemed torn – and really pained by the fact,” writes Cameron. “I found it hard to believe what was happening. Michael was a close confident. Part of my inner team. Someone I turned to for advice. Why hadn’t he told me this before?”

Cameron acknowledges that Gove was a Eurosceptic, but despite years of conversation he seems to have failed to grasp the full extent of it or what that meant in terms of his friend’s terrible crisis of conscience. Gove was not just quite Eurosceptic, like Cameron. Gove was hugely Eurosceptic, privately and at times publicly, and one of the most consistently Eurosceptic figures in British politics and media of the previous two decades.

At no point does it seem to occur to Cameron that another aspect of their relationship could be in play too. Gove – an intensely academic and polite figure – clearly admired Cameron a great deal, but their friendship was by its nature unequal. Cameron and Osborne were the older brothers dealing with a geeky younger brother. The assumption, on Cameron’s part anyway, seems to have been that Gove would respect the code of the Tory moderniser brotherhood, pull himself together and in the end do as David Cameron wanted. Gove broke away because he had his own views and ambitions and placed them above personal loyalty. That’s politics.

Cameron is exceptionally self-contained and self-assured (“the most self-contained person I ever worked with,” as a former cabinet colleague of Cameron described him to me this week). The upside of Cameron’s faith in his own judgment is that in office he knew his own mind. The downside is that he had trouble working out what was going on in the minds of others.

On Boris Johnson, Cameron also expresses considerable hurt when his friend plumps for Brexit and fronts Vote Leave, although at the death he seems more street-wise and realistic when assessing the Johnson approach. As he watches Boris withdraw from the leadership race in 2016, after Gove decided to run himself, Cameron texts him: “Should have stuck with me, mate.”

Ultimately, I fear the former Tory leader misses the essential and obvious point that Gove and Johnson are both, at heart, mischief-making journalists operating with a different mindset from Cameron, a leader with a very particular ethic and a quite traditional public service notion of hierarchy that comes with a presumption of automatic loyalty to those at the top.

Fatally, in his renegotiation with the European Union Cameron made a different mistake and misread Angela Merkel, Germany’s Chancellor, overestimating her power and resolve. The hope was that the dominant leader in Europe would ensure that the renegotiation with the EU 27 produced enough of substance to satisfy British voters worried, at that point, about the migration crisis. As usual, the overrated Merkel failed to rise to the historic challenge. The EU conceded a little, but not enough to give Cameron a winning hand in the referendum he lost in June 2016.

The unravelling of these three key relationships – Gove, Boris and Merkel – is the backdrop to the concluding chapter of a book titled, gloomily, “The End.”

By that point Cameron is beating himself up no end, as though pleading for readmission into polite society. The decisions he made that led to Brexit cause him to reflect every single day, he says. I really hope that is not true. It is a waste of energy and a first-rate brain, because his most vocal critics will never forgive him. Appalled British Remainers blame him for holding a referendum that produced the wrong result, which they believe signalled the end of civilisation. They blame him because it is easier than trying to understand why they lost in the first place.

Some of his critics talk of him as though he is a criminal. It is mad. He hasn’t committed any crime. Losing a referendum, letting the voters decide, was a perfectly noble course. Much worse has happened in democratic politics. Cameron did not start disastrous major wars or almost bankrupt the country.

The hysteria extends to Brexit more broadly. European civilisation is ancient, around 2,500 years old. In contrast, the European Union is a fluctuating set of governing relationships and alliances less than forty years old. Europe will weather changes. Once the current excitement settles down, Britain will end up with a fairly close relationship with its friends and neighbours.

Indeed, Cameron’s central judgement on the European question and on holding a British referendum turned out to be absolutely correct, even if the campaign he ran was ineffective.

He grasped that the question had not been put properly to the British voters since 1975. At each major treaty change it was avoided and integration achieved by deception. Of course, the subject – the EU – had low salience with British voters but they were consistent in saying they disliked excessive EU integration, when asked. No-one can say the voters didn’t care. On a high turnout, 17.4m Britons said Leave.

At some point the question of Britain’s status in the EU was going to be tested and needed to be resolved eventually. It is not Cameron’s fault that his successors as Tory leaders have, so far, made such an awful mess of getting a deal with the EU.

I mentioned a personal story at the beginning that perhaps puts Cameron in a poor light and then analysed several misjudgements. Who is without flaws?

But there is much to praise about this book and the man. Many politicians shed friends on the way to the top. Cameron stuck with his dearest friends, making time for them – as they explained to me with delight – in office. In power, he was always comfortable in the role and he maintained a sense of humour throughout. He managed to leave Number 10 not having been driven mad by it, unlike many of those before him.

Once the Brexit emergency has subsided, his premiership and party leadership will deserve to be seen in a much better light. The public finances were a mess after the Gordon Brown era and Cameron took a range of difficult but broadly right decisions on the economy. Education reform under him was a major success.

On his electoral record, it is worth pointing out that after a long period during which it was said widely that the British Tories, ruined under Sir John Major, would never be back in office, and certainly not in a majority administration, he served for six years as Prime Minister and won the 2015 general election. He also won that referendum in Scotland too, and held together the United Kingdom.

It is said now that the Union between Scotland and England is imperilled anew by Brexit. Perhaps it is, although I recommend taking a longer view. After the difficulty Britain has had unravelling itself from the EU, the notion of Scotland untangling itself easily from the much deeper Union with England will not be an easy sell to Scots. If the UK survives, and Brexit is concluded, I hope people will look back on David Cameron as a pretty decent Prime Minister. Quite a few Britons would take him back tomorrow.

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