Why David Cameron returning as foreign secretary is a good thing

Goodness, this is going to annoy some people and some of them my friends too. Within one minute of David Cameron’s shock appointment as foreign secretary my phone rang. It was an old friend – centrist, a little centre-right, has voted Tory before, anti-Brexit and incandescent. What on earth was Cameron doing joining this bunch of charlatans, this complete shower? Why go down with the sinking ship?

When I suggested I thought it was a good appointment and it had something to do with public service, and Cameron wanting after the Brexit experience to rebuild his political reputation, my friend started shouting and then ended the call. I’m in Sweden this week, perhaps the signal wasn’t so good.

Within minutes another friend got in touch. A Brexiteer, he was convinced this was the end of the Conservative party. Another Thatcherite friend got in touch to defend Suella Braverman. Another said Cameron had been a disaster on everything, which seems harsh considering he took the no hope Tories back to power, eventually winning the overall majority in 2015 all fashionable opinion agreed in the early 2000s would never happen again.

Everyone seemed absolutely furious about the appointment. There was widespread mockery on Twitter, which is increasingly a place where we journalists indulge only in snark, coming off like contestants on the BBC Radio 4 news quiz or wannabe scriptwriters for In the Thick of It style satire.

I disagree. The Cameron appointment is a good appointment not because of some calculation the Tories have made about it changing the electoral situation. I doubt it will make much difference to what appears to be coming, although perhaps there is some marginal gain in the Tories looking more serious as a result.

What really makes it so encouraging is that this decision runs counter to the terrible contemporary habit of senior politicians leaving too early rather than making a practical contribution when they have gained some wisdom. The trend has been corrosive and damaging.

In previous eras they stuck around, learnt from failure and were then on hand to serve again later. Harold Macmillan suffered numerous reverses in the thirty years before he became PM. He learned from experience and was a better leader as a result. Jim Callaghan didn’t quit the field of play when he blundered as Chancellor in 1967. He was moved and nine years later became PM. Churchill had endless setbacks and failures but always sought to serve. Alec Douglas Home famously returned as Foreign Secretary, though with mixed results depending on your view on the EU. The point is he came back to play his part. Isn’t that what public service is? Don’t we like public service which is, let’s face it, always intermingled in politics with personal status and ambition?

Cameron will get masses of criticism. People don’t like it when politicians run away and now they don’t like it when they come back to help. What do we like? Not much these days. 

There are concerns. I hope Cameron will listen on China. A lot has changed, as he is presumably aware.

The message from a friend that gave me the most reason to reflect, to doubt my view, came from a noted geopolitical expert who is not a Cameron fan. He didn’t like what Cameron in office did to defence. Can’t listen to advice, was the critique. Got Libya wrong, screwed up the referendum and was led by George Osborne into the wrong China policy.

Cameron will as foreign secretary have to watch out for all that. When he was last in office there was not yet a bipartisan consensus in the US, a view shared across a lot of the UK spectrum too, that China is a threat. His views have evolved on that subject since 2016. Let’s hope they have evolved sufficiently.

Even factoring in such concerns, isn’t this a positive development? Life is much more interesting with second or third acts, when people learn from mistakes and the rest of us accept complexity and a bit of nuance.

I’ve criticised him plenty of times down the years, but Cameron is a statesman and a patriot serving his country in a perilous international climate. His appointment is welcome news.

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