AFTER 15 years as an MP, 11 of which he spent as leader of the Conservatives, and six of which were spent as Prime Minister, David Cameron is to resign.
He has taken the Chiltern Hundreds, the archaic route out for MPs, causing a by-election in his fairly safe Tory seat of Witney.
It was unexpected. Tory sources were reeling slightly. Cynics suggested he was off to make his fortune, but Cameron doesn’t really need to do that.
It was, as has been reported, more to do with not wanting to rebel against Theresa May.
After all that time Cameron’s legacy will surely be Brexit.
Because of Cameron, his choices, his alliances, his politics, we find ourselves in the most politically and economically uncertain times in most of our lifetimes.
No matter about gay marriage, the so-called living wage and lower unemployment – the former Prime Minister will be known as the man who lost Britain’s membership of the European Union. It is not so much a legacy as an epitaph.
There’s a theory that the referendum was never really meant to happen. It was in the manifesto to appease Tory right-wingers, but would be jettisoned when Cameron and Nick Clegg were forced into coalition negotiations.
Obviously that didn’t happen. The LibDems collapsed, Labour polled poorly, and unexpectedly the Tories had a majority. Maybe that theory’s true, but there’s also every possibility he wanted to fight the referendum because he was confident he could win.
“I’m a winner. I can do this,” he told the nervous leaders of the other EU countries back in December.
Maybe he thought he could. Maybe he looked at the referendum on Scottish independence as an unqualified success, forgetting that he turned a 20-point lead into a 10-point win.
Apart from Brexit, Cameron’s legacy will be Evel, 32.5 per cent of the population living in poverty between 2011 and 2014, a welfare system more ideological than practical and the failure of his foreign policy in Libya.
A report from the Foreign Affairs Committee is expected on Thursday on Cameron’s part in Gadaffi’s downfall, with some indication that it will damn the former Prime Minister for poor planning and for taking action without being aware of the consequences.
That may sum up Cameron’s time. Saying, not thinking of the consequences. How things look rather than how they are. It’s the huskies, the cycling to work while his chauffeur drove behind, the washing the dishes as he addressed the nation on YouTube.
And what has Cameron achieved? Well, he put Michelle Mone in the House of Lords.
Grammar school rift blamed as David Cameron quits parliament
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