David Cameron has quit. Is anyone surprised?

The Conservative party is in disarray. What the party does next matters for the whole of Britain and maybe even for all of liberal democracy. For the British centre-Right to follow its American and French counterparts into nativist populism would be a shift of global and historical significance. Such serious times call for serious people. So, naturally, David Cameron has quit. 

Not for the first time, Cameron is waddling off into the emptiness of early retirement when the alternative was sticking around to do something difficult. Last time the difficult thing was ‘offer stable governance to the country you just broke’. Now it’s ‘help stop your party dragging the country’s politics towards all the things you said you stood against’. 

Just in case readers had forgotten, Cameron just did a quick turn as Rishi Sunak’s foreign secretary, reprising his earnest public servant act in hopes that people will applaud and forget about his previous cameo as clammy-handed lobbyist grasping at Lex Greensill’s cash. 

Fat – and I do mean fat – chance, Dave. The last nine months of vow-to-thee-my-country and photoshoots at summits mean nothing for your legacy and the way you’ll be remembered. If anything, ‘serving’ in the clown-show of the last government only underlines Cameron’s shallowness. 

Almost 20 years ago, Cameron became Tory leader promising a lot of nice things. He would lead a government of quiet competence that would show compassion to those in need. He would value public services and those who provide them. He would resist the Conservative urge to bang on about Europe and focus on Britons’ everyday concerns. He would put the national interest first.

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Could these be the online comments of young Kemi Badenoch?

Well, it sounded good. And that, I suppose, could well be history’s verdict on Cameron – he said some things that sounded good, then did things that demonstrated that he didn’t really give a fig about any of it.

Hence betting – and losing – everything on a referendum he’d always said wasn’t necessary or helpful. And hence serving in the fag-end Sunak government whose central thesis (if it truly had one) was the repudiation of all those noble things Cameron once said he held dear. 

Amid all the other noise around the Tory collapse, this hasn’t had enough attention. The David Cameron who hugged huskies, put a turbine on his house and said ‘vote blue, go green’ happily parked his backside on the red benches as part of a government that stumbled into climate scepticism after accidentally winning the Uxbridge by-election. The David Cameron who promised HS2 and a Northern Powerhouse joined a government that announced it was scrapping HS2 in Manchester. The David Cameron who refused to deal with Ukip because they were ‘fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists’ sat happily in a Farage-curious government that devised the Rwanda debacle just so it could tell the same audience it was planning to send them back where they came from.

And why? No doubt Cameron himself would justify himself with words like ‘service’ and ‘national interest’, but there are other explanations too. Perhaps Cameron isn’t naive enough to think that a spell of selfless service back in government might wash away some of the reputational grime that comes from lobbying your old employees for a big bag of money. 

Maybe instead his real reason for going back into government was more prosaic still: boredom. It is, frankly, hard to be an ex-prime minister. You go from having huge power and the attention of the world to, well, nothing. Days that were full to the brim are suddenly empty. A life that was consumed with a single, clear purpose now seems aimless.

Some ex-PMs have made their political after-life viable. Tony Blair has built a serious commercial policy shop around himself, giving him some of the attention and influence all major politicians crave. Gordon Brown has focussed on charity work while also remaining a force in Labour thinking.

Of the other – increasingly numerous – ex-PMs on the block, Theresa May has and will continue to do the job well when she goes to the Lords with local campaigning, and a spot of baking. Boris Johnson has just gone back to his original full-time job of being Boris Johnson. No one really knows what Liz Truss will do, but she will probably, in her uniquely weird way, be quite happy with decades in denial, deaf to national ridicule. 

Rishi Sunak, meanwhile, will do very nicely as a former premier. He’s young enough and smart enough and rich enough to have a genuine second act, probably in tech. (His leadership on global AI policy was probably the one thing he did in office that the rest of the world noticed or cared about.)

But what about poor old Dave? Not long ago he had all the things every human ego craves. With a word, he could change the world to his liking. He could command the attention of nations, start wars, sweep aside those who opposed him. He had power. He mattered.

And now? What does Cameron have? No doubt he’ll find ways to fill the days and years ahead: a bit of charity work; the odd well-paid speech; more tennis. It’s the sort of comfortable life familiar to retired CEOs in their late 60s or 70s, but Cameron is 57.

That means what comes next for David Cameron is decades of looking for ways to avoid facing up to the fact that he’ll be remembered as a failure. That nothing he did really meant anything, or mattered.