A defence of David Cameron | TheArticle

He’s been hit from all sides with buckets-full of invective, his biography was brutalised by reviewers, his character has been torn to bits and his time in No.10 has been roundly condemned.

But towering over all this is his legacy — Brexit. This one thing, above all, is taken as the sign of Cameron’s outright failure. He allowed a small group of hard right “loonies and

fruitcakes” to pressure him into a referendum that he didn’t want and which the country didn’t need. The result has been pandemonium.

That may be true. And yet, even so, Cameron has performed one of the most important services to the country in the last thirty years. He has done something that no other prime minister in

modern times — not Blair, not Brown and certainly not May — has been able to achieve.

By setting the Brexit process in motion, Cameron has allowed Britain to see its true character. The referendum revealed, in a flash of light, the real political divide that exists in Britain

— a divide that a little over a year before the Brexit vote, it is worth recalling, had been happily obscured by a general election result that had given Cameron an outright majority.

In the election of May 2015, Cameron, that proud member of the west London, liberal elite, had even managed to win 24 new seats. There was no indication back then of what was to follow in

June 2016, when the same electorate voted to do something entirely at odds with the character of the government that it had only just elected.

Could it be that the fundamental political character of the country had somehow changed in the space of 13 months? Could Britain have gone from liberal to nationalist in such a short space

of time?

I think not. National sentiment is not so fluid. Which leads to the conclusion that a more nationalist impulse was there all along and that the general election result of 2015, and the

election results of the preceding 40 years, had been unable to reveal it. But Cameron’s referendum did reveal. It gave us our first true self-portrait.

It’s hard to overstate how important this is to Britain — and more specifically to England. The Welsh, the Scots and Northern Irish all have mainstream nationalist parties. But England has

never had an acceptable nationalism of its own. Instead, England has myths, a now familiar spread of foundational stories — the Blitz Spirit, the first Day of the Somme, 1966 — which meld

together into a warm soup of remembered, indistinct Englishness.

But none of this amounts to a realistic idea of what England’s place in the world actually is. In the famous words of Dean Acheson, “Great Britain has lost an Empire but not yet found a

role.” But a role cannot be founded on half-remembered myths. It must be founded on international relations, on economic agreements and on a canny combination of soft and hard power. Britain

had that through its membership of the EU. That will soon fall away. Now Britain must confront the world alone. More than anything else, that experience will teach Britain — and the English

— who they really are.

So yes, he was glib and perhaps a little superficial. I remember meeting Cameron in No. 10 at the annual Lobby drinks one summer. It was the only time I ever spoke to him and the

conversation turned to what he’d be reading over the holiday. He told me he’d just pinched a copy of Imran Khan’s biography from the Pakistan Embassy and that he was planning to read that.

People laughed. But I remembered not quite being sure what to make of the comment — or of the man. Had he really just stolen it? Or had it been intended as a joke?

But the electorate looked at Cameron, his glibness, his charm, his pseudo-Blairite confidence — and they liked it. Despite all that austerity, the electorate voted for him. But on the most

important vote, on Brexit, the electorate didn’t go with him. His strength was in his mastery of the party electoral system — but that system concealed the fact that the country was split,

not only along left-right lines, but along another axis, one that went much deeper.

David Cameron revealed that split. That he did so unintentionally is irrelevant. Were it not for him, we would not now be at this moment of reckoning. We may not like this moment. But both

Leaver and Remainer must grant that Cameron’s referendum has brought us face to face with the question of Britain’s national identity — and to the question of whether Britain is really a

nation at all. In time, that may prove to have been a very valuable service indeed.

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