Why history is unlikely to look kindly upon David Cameron

When he resigned, he cited “building a bigger and stronger society” as one of his achievements, yet his Big Society programme was never coherent. It made little impact before initiatives were shut down. Perhaps its main achievement was to allow him to appear concerned about social wellbeing for long enough to win elections.

In marked contrast, his pursuit of austerity was sustained. In a speech in 2013, he stated he wanted austerity to be permanent, drawing criticism from the Office for Budget Responsibility that the strategy was holding back recovery from the financial crisis. He couldn’t build the Big Society because he was unwilling to make the investments needed for society to recover from the crisis.

Where other recent prime ministers have suffered career-defining failures which were the result of putting too much trust in narrowly defined economic models, David Cameron was eventually caught out by a policy gap, which he could not bridge with a swift policy pivot.

Like Tony Blair, his core political skill was triangulating. He thrived by offering something to everyone, without it ever being clear what he himself stood for. Occupying the comfortable centre ground, he managed to build a coalition which had (just) enough support to keep him in power.

This triangulation approach is likely to work well when society is so stable that a little bit of technocratic tinkering enables a constant stream of marginal gains. And here it’s interesting to note that like Barack Obama, David Cameron was interested in Richard Thaler’s libertarian paternalist approach to economic policy.

It’s managerial. It avoids real leadership, and never involves hard choices or much imagination. It “nudges” people into doing things which wise policy makers know they want to make. Arguably, it’s also innately conservative, and deeply elitist. That’s a critique of Thaler’s economics. It also fits Cameron very neatly. The 2010 election campaign, fought while the country was recovering from the financial crisis, came too soon for Cameron to win a majority. The Conservatives were the largest party, but needed to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. As the senior partner in the coalition, Cameron became Prime Minister.

This arrangement worked well for him. The Liberal Democrats loved to claim they were tempering the more brutal tendencies of their partners, even as they struggled to demonstrate that any of their priorities were being addressed. As they gave up key commitments for seats at the cabinet table, seemingly without even a moment of regret, people stopped trusting them.

David Cameron was interested in Richard Thaler’s libertarian paternalist approach to economic policy

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THE coalition enabled the Conservatives to present themselves to English voters as the only safe choice. In 2015, they won their first majority since 1992, reducing the Liberal Democrats to only eight MPs, while using fear of the SNP’s seeming willingness to work with Labour as a rallying call for Unionism.

So far, so good, it seemed. But to hold together his party, and try to fend off burgeoning support for Ukip, Cameron had included a manifesto pledge to hold a referendum on membership of the EU. Winning the election, this became a millstone round his neck.

He made a desultory attempt to renegotiate the UK’s relationship with the EU, campaigned actively for the UK to remain in Europe, and lost the referendum.

Almost as soon as the result was announced, he stated his intention to resign. He claimed to have worked “in the only way I know how – which is to say directly and passionately what I think and feel”. That was not how it seemed at the time.

The Remain campaign did not simply lack the passionate intensity of the Leave campaign. It lacked any clear vision about what it meant to be both European and British.

Faced with the Leave campaign’s simple mantra to “take back control”, Remainers had no stronger rebuttal than remarking, rather like a tradesman discussing a competitor’s quote: “Well, that’ll cost you.”

For many of the electorate, when asked, the price seemed like good value. They felt English rather than European. They had just been through the longest recession since the 1930s.

That had been a dire experience for the whole country, draining many communities of hope, and leading to widespread alienation from political parties: Labour for causing the crisis; the Conservatives for prolonging it; and the Liberal Democrats for turning out to be shallow opportunists.

They were ready to embrace a message which targeted their sense of identity, and addressed their lived experience.

In some ways, they were not voting to leave the EU – they were voting to take back control of their own lives, and of their communities.

Of course they would not listen to the man who had slowed down recovery, now triangulating desperately by claiming that he’d made a couple of tweaks to the settings of the machinery, and that had sorted the problems.

Even more so, when that came with the underlying message that the voters should just let the prime minister and his pals get on with running the country.