Good morning. David Cameron really is the new foreign secretary. In a way, Rishi Sunak warned us: just over a year ago, he told Tory party conference that his mission was to break with a failed 30-year political consensus and usher in something genuinely different. All the same, I don’t know if anyone could have predicted that he was planning to go back to a 60-year-old idea, instead. Even Cameron, truly the grown-up’s grown-up, was barely out of nappies when Alec Douglas-Home, the last former prime minister to take over at the foreign office, got the job in 1970.
On the other hand, it seems … quite hard to break with a 30-year consensus by appointing one of its architects, even if doing so successfully drives the firing of home secretary Suella Braverman – who lost her job via an unceremonious phone call - from the front pages. “He was the future once,” the new cabinet minister once teased Tony Blair at prime minister’s questions. We can now say that Cameron was the past once, a significantly more mind-bending proposition. The weirdest fact of the day: seven years after his resignation as prime minister, he’s still four years younger than Keir Starmer.
