David Cameron returns to government and the film Saltburn, a horror version of Brideshead Revisited and its longing for aristocracy, opens to greet him. Both offer an irresistible mirage of the British class system. Both have a David Cameron at their heart.
Cameron is part of the Etonian hegemony that rose after Tony Blair; in 2010 Gordon Brown just didn’t seem right. A centre-Left government will always struggle in a constitutional monarchy — we expect our leaders to look like Imperial-era portraits — and Brown wasn’t as soothingly upper middle class as Blair. The Cameron administration was gaudy, superficially competent, and, in retrospect, it failed utterly, leaving us ripe for Brexit, Boris Johnson and other emerging horrors. I am surprised that Cameron has the nerve to return, but they don’t teach shame at Eton. Everything that terrifies us — the populism, the growing lack of trust in liberal democracy, the contempt, the rage — grew in the embers of Cameron’s inborn incuriosity and complacence. This is an unequal country with a corrupt or gormless political class, failing public services and a population drugged by trash culture who will take to the streets to terrorise elected politicians and vulnerable minorities at weekends. Austerity broke us, and Cameron built a shepherd’s hut in the wreckage: David Antoinette! At least the housing stock increased by one unit. I don’t believe the pig story for one moment. It is too pure a metaphor for a man with no imagination.
