The publication of extracts from David Cameron’s memoirs casts a chill light on the flaws of the British political system. The interest lies not in the detail of who stabbed whose back or which lies Boris Johnson told and when. By releasing only extracts, Mr Cameron is able to control the narrative for a few days. The full verdict must wait until the whole book is out. But a broad outline already seems clear.
Mr Cameron is upper-class – a distant relation of the Queen. Yet he won two elections in a country which was supposed to be a “classless society”. His father was a stockbroker who sent his clever son to Eton. From there, he went to Oxford where Mr Cameron was a member of a posh dining club. He was also smart, gaining a first-class degree. His poshness never held him back in politics, neither did the Notting Hill set he cultivated. Mr Cameron’s right-hand man was George Osborne, the son of a baronet. At a time of austerity and economic gloom, it might have been considered dangerous to look out of touch. His political skill was to translate his personal brand into a guarantee that his was a new, moderate Tory party.
No one should be blamed for their parents or their luck. By the standards of everyday life he seems an unremarkably decent man; by the standards of some of his colleagues, a kind and thoughtful one. But politicians should not be judged by the standards of everyday life. They should be held to higher ones, because it is in their power to make much more damaging mistakes than most people can.
Mr Cameron was quite without the imagination or the moral seriousness to see the suffering that his government caused by its austerity policies; he was a man who could not really believe that food banks were needed even in his own prosperous constituency of Witney as a result of his deliberate actions. And just as he could not register the pain and anger of the financially dispossessed who had been robbed of their futures, he could not feel the rage of those who’d been robbed of their pasts: the emotionally dispossessed whose vision of England could not be accommodated in his bland, technocratic, comfortable new world. “Closet racists, fruitcakes”, he called them. However true this judgment appears now that they have climbed out of the closet, it betrayed an extraordinary lack of understanding of elements of his own party.
His whole life was spent among people for whom mistakes would not ultimately matter. Yet political passion is strongest in people who know that they can’t afford mistakes and can scarcely afford bad luck. There is something very broken about a system which allowed him to rise to the top without ever understanding why most of the other players were in the game. Until the end of his career his niceness never cost him anything, but his inability to see that others – particularly those he knew well – did not think or act as he did has cost his country very dearly.
