Saturday 15th October

There has just been published a ‘poll’ by senior Professors of Politics in the U.K. assessing the success or failure, in other words the ranking, of British post-war Prime Ministers. No surprise that Clement Atlee tops the poll, followed by Thatcher and Blair.  At the bottom we find in order of ‘failure’ Anthony Eden, Alec Douglas Hume and David Cameron.  Now of course these polls are subject to fashion and longer term History may judge them differently.  But it does show how quickly Cameron has fallen out of favour, it was only 18 month ago when he stood on the steps of Number 10 having won the first Majority Conservative Administration 23 years after John Major exceeded all expectation and won in 1992.  Mind you Cameron did it on a much lower percentage of the vote, thanks to UKIP and the SNP, taking millions of votes and one seat for the former and forty-nine for the latter – such is the irrationality of our first-past-the-post system.

Of course we had already had five years of Cameron in the ill-fated (for the LibDems) Coalition, and I along with many others groaned as the results came in and it became obvious that despite all the polls the Tories would win again.  They had been nasty enough for five years with Clegg and Company desperately hanging onto their coat-tails and trying to stop their worst excesses.  Little good did it do them.  We had had two referendums in those five years.  The first, a concession to the LibDems, on Proportional Representation, which failed miserably, in part because of indecision on the part of Labour and a distinctly uninterested electorate.  The second was far more dangerous.  Cameron agreed to the SNP, already a powerful force in the Scottish Parliament but yet to make a real breakthrough in Westminster elections, who wanted Independence.  It looked an easy win for the Union but as Election-day approached the polls narrowed and suddenly a chill went through England as the possibility of Scotland leaving loomed large.  It was largely down to Gordon Brown, a recently defeated and derided Prime Minister, to make the case for a much more devolved Scotland to remain.  Well, Cameron scraped home in the end, but in a strange way this only served to strengthen the SNP, who a year later made huge gains at Westminster, largely at Labour’s expense.

But in order to help him win the coming election and to try to shoot UKIP’s fox Cameron recklessly promised an in/out Referendum on our remaining in the EU.  Not only did he miss the fox but he blew open the hen-house doors.  His Project Fear, which had served him well a year earlier when he terrified Middle England at the prospect of a Labour/SNP coalition, came apart with every new intervention by Carney or Obama or Lagarde.  And despite many of these predictions which may still come home to roost in the years to come the electorate simply didn’t believe the Eton boys.  Well, we are all living now with the consequences; rising prices in the shops, business now worried that we will be out of the Single Market, the SNP demanding a second referendum, and M.P.s of all colours furious that Mrs. May thinks she can go it alone and negotiate terms with no scrutiny at all.

I thought in February when Cameron returned like Chamberlain from Munich waving a piece of paper with his ‘renegotiation’ amounting to the tiniest and colourless hill of beans you ever saw, that he looked incredibly stupid.  As if anyone would be in the slightest convinced by them, but he huffed and he puffed and in the end he blew all our houses down.  And how stupid does he look now?  Well, he isn’t even around for us to jeer at anymore; scarpered, tail between his legs, comfortable pension in his mitt and the after-dinner speaker circuit beckoning he looks very stupid.  But we are even more stupid in ever believing in the Millionaire Cabinet he assembled and the promises he made; how much was it he promised for the NHS, 50 million I believe – well, that ‘ain’t gonna happen now is it?