David Cameron’s government feels so long ago. Seven years of almost constant Tory turmoil, upheaval in all the other parties, huge strikes and economic crises, the war in Ukraine and the pandemic catastrophe: together, they make Cameron’s calm resignation statement outside 10 Downing Street in 2016, and his jaunty humming afterwards, seem like something from another, less frightening era.
In some ways, the worse things get in this country, the better it is for Cameron’s reputation. Even the most damaging acts of his six-year tenure – from calling the Brexit referendum to imposing austerity to the military intervention in Libya – are steadily disappearing behind the subsequent disasters under Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. The social liberalism of Cameron’s premiership can be overstated: he only overcame Tory opposition to same-sex marriage with Labour support. But his liberalism seems more of an achievement now that his party has reverted to being reactionary.
Meanwhile, some voters and journalists have simply lost interest in his government. When he gave evidence at the Covid inquiry this week, half the seats in the modestly sized hearing room for reporters and members of the public were not occupied. Given how unpopular the Conservatives are currently, being semi-ignored is arguably a kind of victory.
And yet, the dividing line between the Toryism of the Cameroons, as they were once a little indulgently known, and the more obviously nasty and chaotic Conservatism that has followed is not as solid as anyone tempted to be nostalgic for the Cameron years might imagine. To a significant, yet increasingly forgotten extent, Cameron’s premiership was not a contrast to today’s Conservatism but its origin.
It was as his home secretary that Theresa May said in 2012: “The aim is to create, here in Britain, a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants.” At the same year’s Tory conference, held when half those in poverty were in working families, the chancellor, George Osborne, chose to speak instead about people “sleeping off a life on benefits”. Putting people into crude, socially divisive categories for political advantage was not something the Cameron government invented, but it was a strikingly aggressive practitioner of the strategy. The Conservative victory in the 2015 election, their first outright win for 23 years, ensured that the party would continue to divide and rule.
Osborne is a less polite kind of elite Englishman than Cameron, and so during their government he often played the aggressive role. Yet Cameron’s own politics have long mixed mildness with harsher elements. In his Downing Street memoir, defensively titled For the Record and published during Johnson’s premiership, there are some indirect criticisms of unnamed Tories for making the party “less liberal” and less of “a broad church”. But there are also passages that may surprise Cameron’s centrist admirers, such as Tony Blair and Keir Starmer’s speechwriter Philip Collins. On austerity, Cameron writes: “My assessment now is that we probably didn’t cut enough … The job we started still needs to be finished.” In that crucial respect at least, he thinks his successors have not been rightwing enough.
Since being forced from office by their Brexit blunder, at the young political ages of 49 and 45 respectively, Cameron and Osborne have tried to reinvent themselves. Osborne has become a political commentator on TV, who smiles and laughs knowingly to signal his distance from the partisan scowler he used to be. Cameron, blamed more for Brexit, perhaps because of his apparent insouciance after the result, has been more low-profile, except when exposed in 2021 for lobbying the government on behalf of the disgraced financier Lex Greensill. Both Cameron and Osborne have earned a lot of money since leaving parliament, while millions made poorer by their policies have continued to suffer.
The duo’s appearance before the Covid inquiry was a rare chance, it seemed, to hold them to account for their overconfident government. It has been widely concluded by authorities on the NHS and public health that austerity worsened the pandemic, and in the hearing room Cameron sometimes seemed nervous. He took frequent sips of water, and punctuated some of his answers with small coughs and stutters.
Osborne was more prickly, listening to one question from the inquiry’s lawyer with his arms tightly folded, and talking over others. But the interrogation of each politician lasted little more than an hour, and neither lost their composure, or conceded that austerity had been an error in any way. On the contrary, they both claimed that it had made the pandemic bailouts possible, by rescuing the government’s finances. It was just the kind of move that Johnson would have made: presenting a contentious or discredited policy as a triumph.
Tories are usually confident in public. But since Cameron’s haughty premiership, despite often being unpopular and apparently out of their depth, and despite presiding over a national decline with few parallels in the rich world, this self-regard has thickened further, into a disdain for scrutiny. It frustrates the party’s enemies, and anyone else who wants to probe the government. “Please, just let me ask my question,” said the Covid inquiry’s lawyer to Osborne, as he talked over her once again.
Time may finally be running out for this version of Conservatism. As Johnson recently discovered, cocky and slapdash Tories may thrive in the theatrical parts of our political system – such as a parliament where members are usually forbidden from calling each other “liars” – but the more patient and factual world of select committees and official reports can be a much less hospitable environment.
The Covid inquiry hopes to publish an interim verdict on Britain’s “preparedness and resilience” for the pandemic in 2024, also likely to be when the next election is held. The report may make it impossible to continue to insist, as Osborne did this week, that public spending cuts had “no connection whatsoever” to the inequalities exploited by the virus.
Yet understanding how the Cameron government left us vulnerable to Covid ought to be just the start. From failing to tame the City after the financial crisis to appeasing the Tory far right, from fragmenting England’s school system to making Truss a minister for the first time, the Cameroons’ mistakes have haunted us for years. Whenever this Tory era ends, they should not be allowed to saunter away from the wreckage.
Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist
This article was amended on 23 June 2023. An earlier headline referenced the Covid “inquest” instead of Covid inquiry.
