Missing David Cameron: have you seen this man?
Whatever happened to that chap Cameron? You know who I mean. Wrote the 2005 Tory manifesto, MP for Witney, was the future once. And now it is almost as though he never existed. Indeed, David Cameron and his supporters have been all but vanished here in Birmingham at Conservative party conference.
When the Chancellor made his speech there was a brief mention of Cameron, and of George Osborne too, but the applause was hardly thunderous from the hall. Perhaps the members of the audience were still discombobulated by the Chancellor’s jokes. Or perhaps not.
Elsewhere, the men who ran the country for six years, and the Conservative party for eleven years, have been put in the rubbish bin of history. Whereas just six months ago they were the sun around which the Tory party and British current affairs orbited, they are now just a distant memory.
There are some Cameroons here, but those I have encountered seem to be wandering around in something of a daze. “It’s incredible. It’s as though David has been disappeared,” a former leading Cameroon told me last night.
The reason that has happened so brutally is simple. It is not just that the Tory party is utterly ruthless and unsentimental. The Cameron defeat on the referendum leaves him and his team resented or disregarded by both Leavers and Remainers. Leavers were on the other side in the battle and defeated him, leaving him the loser. Remainers are annoyed he got himself into a mess in which a referendum became unavoidable. He then proceeded to hand the campaign over to Sir Craig Oliver who, along with others, made an almighty mess of it. That leaves Remainers thinking of him as a loser. All told, few people in the Tory tribe, the country or the media are any longer prepared to give Cameron and Osborne their due.
But I will admit it. I rather miss David Cameron and (after the new Chancellor’s “exciting” speech) George Osborne too. Yes, yes, there was plenty to criticise, but there were also flashes of flair. Cameron took his party out of opposition, removed Gordon Brown (although not cleanly) and then repositioned the Tories to the extent that they could win an overall majority, which was once seen during the Blair Terror as an impossibility. He then led the UK towards the EU exit. Not deliberately, but you can’t have everything. Throughout, he maintained a cavalier sense of humour and an admirable sense of proportion.
The fear is that in contrast the Age of May is – how can one put this politely? – shaping up to be Cromwellian, meaning not a lot of fun. The rampant control-freakery of Number 10 combined with a certain joylessness in the air may be just what the country ordered after the excitements of the summer. But I wonder. The country didn’t vote for the Age of May and the Tories need to remember it. That Tory majority was down to David Cameron.
UPDATE: One May era innovation worth welcoming is the abandonment of the “hi-viz” jacket favoured by Cameron and Osborne to indicate they were for the workers. On a trip to a Birmingham building site this morning, the Prime Minister and the Chancellor went without “hi-viz”. It looked grown up. Which is probably why they did it.