Trotters up, or down? Even if you once admired Danny Dyer’s immortal summary of post-Brexit David Cameron – “He’s in Europe, in Nice, with his trotters up” – there’s a strong case for wishing he’d stayed that way.
When Cameron’s trotters were up, we were at least spared the surely more distressing spectacle of his trotters blithely ascending the moral high ground. When he was in Nice he wasn’t travelling the world and, with all the authority of a man who used to press the services of Lex Greensill on his former colleagues, educating it on his old speciality, “the right thing to do”.
Amazingly, given how often Cameron repeated this catchphrase as prime minister, no one in the UK thought to respond, as congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene recently did: “Frankly, he can kiss my ass.” The US House of Representatives’ speaker, Mike Johnson, subsequently refused Cameron a meeting about Ukraine, even after being warned by the foreign secretary, in a US opinion piece, about “appeasement”. “This is personal for me,” Cameron wrote. “My grandfather stormed the beaches of Normandy under covering fire from US warships.” We can only speculate whether a less performative approach might have been more diplomatically effective.
Last week, Benjamin Netanyahu, also unbeguiled, said pointedly after meeting Cameron: “We will make our decisions ourselves.”
Although Cameron is, of course, only one of thousands of disgraced and unwanted public schoolboys dispatched, over the years, to advance British interests abroad, it is arguably incongruous, even unhelpful in a more sensitive era, for such an extreme example of domestic failure to be passed off, abroad, as a diplomatic asset. Considering the immediate UK response when Cameron was promoted despite his calamitous political record and recent support for the Chinese belt and road initiative, it might be desirable to keep important foreign contacts in ignorance for as long as possible about his legacy, reputation and habits.
We can be reasonably confident that a Cameron mention of “the right thing to do” does not – yet – prompt reflexive disbelief and nausea in international contacts. When he tells a US audience something is “the right thing to do”, it is unlikely to recall that the Brexit referendum was also, according to him,“the right thing to do”; austerity was “the right thing to do”; invading Libya without a plan was “the right thing to do”; tax cuts were the “right thing to do”; hiring Andy Coulson, a Murdoch employee who went to prison for phone hacking, was the “right thing to do”. Running away from his Brexit catastrophe was, naturally, the “right thing to do”. And looking back on the UK’s economic and reputational collapse, Cameron now tells us Brexit itself, was “the right thing to do”.
The phrase, encapsulating Cameron’s singular habit whenever he speaks or writes of supplying a simultaneous commentary on his own rectitude, appears 13 times in his memoir. If part two, detailing his triumphs as foreign secretary, is not called The Right Thing to Do, it can only be because he’s saving it for his tombstone.
With the help of the Foreign Office, Cameron is now adding to this stream of incessant self-endorsement a sideline in promotional videos. These bring together a couple of old Cameron tricks – speaking without notes and, as he tried in WebCameron, supposedly artless glimpses of the real him – with a hectic walk and talk style borrowed from The West Wing. The fiction being that his team has “challenged” Cameron to recite all the things that keep him so incredibly, preternaturally busy that he must speak at speed, striding between important meetings. “So (walking fast towards the camera) I’ve spent two days here in Brussels and my challenge is to explain everything we’re gonna DO now before I leave this conference centre and geddinto the car” (challenge over, we see this grandson of a war hero stride undeviatingly towards his destiny).
Marvellous! Confirming that no lasting lessons were learned from Cameron’s earliest appearances, when the no-notes delivery he picked up at Eton was widely mistaken for evidence of political ability, his recent stunts were promptly taken, including by reviewers previously considered discerning, to be tokens of diplomatic talent. The videos are “slick”, “effective”, they offer something we’ve recently missed without an Etonian in charge, “effortless authority”. To judge by the reviews, these carefully choreographed performances promise, along with awed reports of a tireless schedule, to overwrite the reputation for chillaxing vividly confirmed in Sasha Swire’s diaries.
Equally important for Cameron’s prospects, his job offers rehabilitation from, for instance, that time when he and Greensill (whom the UK insolvency service now wants to ban from running companies for up to 15 years) met Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, a year after Jamal Khashoggi was murdered. Not forgetting – for now – his endorsement of that magnificent example of debt-trap diplomacy, the Chinese-owned Colombo Port City.
Already, in fact, Cameron is being complimented, apparently seriously, for putting the remains of the country he broke in 2016 back on the “international stage”. Senior diplomats told the Financial Times that Cameron has brought “weight and heft” to a Foreign Office that may not, after all, be in need of modernisation. Recently, reform-minded experts argued (from a medieval Oxford college) that the ministry is elitist, inappropriately grand and too liable to become a personal fiefdom: Cameron used the pretext of his “first 100 days” to swank down its marble staircase on his way to “my first debate in the House of Lords”.
Yet again by dint of acting the part, Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton finds he can rekindle, including in alleged meritocrats, a primitive fondness for patrician representation. Even the unelected status that excuses him both constituency duties and explaining himself in the commons, has been cited as a plus. And of course, for the sort of foreign secretary who has yet to come clean about the fortune he made out of Greensill, it is.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
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