Who’s that walking up Downing Street? Why, it’s the man who ghosted Britain! In some ways the sight of David Cameron back in SW1 was always a possibility. Behavioural science tells us these guys often return to the scene of their crimes – either to retrieve a trophy, or to show police the various burial sites in the hope of receiving a slightly more lenient sentence. In this case, from the history books.
But let’s be real: the only acceptable excuse Cameron would have for being in the Downing Street area is that he has been sent back in time to terminate his past self before the moment he accidentally sets the UK on the course of permacrisis politics, in which it is still agonisingly and destructively trapped. Unfortunately, the Cameron unit has made the wrong calculations – again – and emerged through the space-time tear seven and a half years too late. He is now foreign secretary, and after his full-spectrum triumph in Libya it will certainly be interesting to see what Mr Failed State achieves in that role. Sorry, that’s unfair – Lord Failed State.
With the best will in the world, then, Rishi Sunak’s big move feels most squarely pitched at the emergency podcast market. Is there such a thing as an emergency foreign secretary? Tangentially, I’m actually slightly surprised Cameron isn’t himself already doing a podcast. His closest political ally, George Osborne, has got one with his own former Labour opposite number Ed Balls, where the chat has the feel of two buddy cops shooting the breeze in their car on a stake-out outside the Treasury. If they move their vehicle to the kerb opposite the Foreign Office, Cameron can now send room service out to them, like Axel Foley in Beverly Hills Cop.
Inevitably, people have suggested that pulling a move to restore Cameron to the frontline is like rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, but arguably that doesn’t really cover it. This is not like shifting the deckchairs in 1912, an hour after the iceberg had hit, but like doing it now, in 2023, when David Cameron’s form has been largely consumed by molluscs, and fish have been swimming in and out of his cavities, along with the various Treasury committee members who in 2021 probed his lucrative lobbying of ministers on behalf of the now-collapsed Greensill Capital. These days, he’s arguably more reef than man.
Perhaps instead of representing the triumph of experience, as billed, Cameron’s return as foreign secretary says something about our age of defeat, where some of the gurus most fetishised are the ones who already had a go and failed, in many cases absolutely disastrously. I know you learn a lot from failure, but I sometimes wonder if the United Kingdom deserves slightly more than being a recurring plot device in these people’s journey towards personal growth. Many will feel David wouldn’t even deserve a comeback as an ITV press officer, his only previous job outside politics.
In fact, speaking of ITV … at almost the exact same moment Cameron was being photographed shaking hands with Sunak in the cabinet room, Nigel Farage was being photographed in Queensland for his upcoming stint on I’m a Celebrity (having somehow sidestepped Australia’s famously strict biosecurity rules). Which of these two employment gambits will turn out to be the more significant booking in the long term? It says a lot about the deranged political culture we’ve been living in since Cameron do-be-do-be-dooed his way out of Downing Street in 2016 that, at the present moment, I’d call it for Farage’s trip to the jungle.
For now, we might have to accept the Cameron appointment is like the moment in a much-loved family game when you realise you’ve played it through, and the children start wailing, “We’ve HAD all these cards!” And after years of exhausting turmoil in which the only thing achieved has been decline, we have indeed had all these cards. As Andy Warhol once remarked, in the future every single Conservative MP will hold a vital UK government brief for 15 minutes – and this has surely now been so comprehensively achieved that we are downcycling former prime ministers into vacant jobs. Fifteen people alone have been housing minister since May 2010. You have to remember that even Andrea Jenkyns, the missing link between the vegetable and mineral kingdoms, has been an education minister. At the time she held this role last year, Andrea was pictured walking into Downing Street giving the middle finger to members of the public – so it means a lot that she saw yesterday as the opportunity to announce “enough is enough”, and to submit her letter of no confidence in Rishi Sunak.
At the time of writing, we are still waiting for the formal departure letter from Suella Braverman, who was very belatedly sacked by Sunak on Monday morning, apparently over an issue with tone. Which makes her sending-off sound like it was for sarcastic applause to a referee, as opposed to whipping up tensions to the point where far-right thugs stormed the police barricades round the Cenotaph on Armistice Day. While they’ve had a lot to say about other aspects of Saturday’s march, there has been a distinct lack of condemnation of these particular scenes from the right of the Conservative party. Perhaps they found them charming? In any case Sunak’s attempts to buy them off seem unlikely to do the trick. But mildly eye-catching appointments on that front include the return of Esther McVey, who becomes a cabinet-attending minister without portfolio, whose actual brief, it has been reported, is to be the “common sense tsar”. Something of an oxymoron there – then again, maybe there is something of the late-stage Romanovs to this latest attempt at accommodation with a fast-advancing appointment with unpleasant reality.
Ultimately, we now have an unelected foreign secretary appointed by an unelected prime minister, and are being asked to consider the mood as fresh. It was only a few weeks ago that Rishi Sunak was trying to cast himself as the change candidate, and to define the rest of his prime ministership against all the mistakes made by all his recent predecessors in Tory rule, including Cameron. Evidently, that pose has now been abandoned, as others will be on the prime minister’s inexorable journey towards the next general election. Sunak comes across as a man who has only had one good idea in his entire political career (the furlough scheme), and is forever trying and failing to have another one, convinced that he’ll strike it if he just drills into a bit more detail/rummages deep enough in the bag of yesterday’s men. There must be another one down there somewhere … mustn’t there?
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
On Monday 11 December 8pm–9.30pm GMT, join John Crace, Marina Hyde and Pippa Crerar for a livestream discussion on another year of anarchy in British politics. Book tickets here or at theguardian.live
