Wearing a polo shirt, ear defenders, a Peaky Blinders-style hat and black wellington boots, David Cameron was driving Jeremy Clarkson’s tractor this time last year on a sunny Saturday morning when it exploded. “There was a bang and a Ukraine-sized mushroom cloud,” wrote Clarkson, who lives in a village neighbouring the hamlet of Dean in Oxfordshire where the former prime minister has a £1.5m home. “Oil splattered into all the blackberry bushes and bits of iron were to be heard landing several minutes later,” Clarkson said of his “mate’s” accident on his drive. Cameron had borrowed the red 1961 Massey Ferguson to mow his paddock, the broadcaster explained in a Sunday Times column. “He claims of course that he didn’t do anything wrong.”
Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton, as he will be introduced in the House of Lords on Monday in order to allow him to serve in Rishi Sunak’s cabinet as foreign secretary, is no stranger to making such pink-cheeked denials of blame. There was the holding and losing of the Brexit referendum, the accusations of familiar relations with a pig’s head in his Oxford days and more recently the pocketing of $1m (£800,000) a year for his lobbying of ministers on behalf of the distressed finance company Greensill Capital. “I am riding to the rescue with supply chain finance with my new friend Lex Greensill,” texted Cameron in one of 12 messages to the then permanent secretary to the Treasury Sir Tom Scholar on 6 March 2020, when the financial markets were in freefall at the start of the Covid pandemic.
