Why David Cameron may never be able to make a comeback

He’s been in the political wilderness since the Brexit referendum and, writes Sean O'Grady, Cameron’s reported refusal to chair a climate conference shows he’ll probably stay there – doomed by his one colossal mistake

Blue it: a Cameron revival isn’t on the cards (Getty)

Few political reputations have sunk so low and as quickly as that of David Cameron. We all know why. Almost four years after the 2016 Brexit referendum, he is still something of an embarrassment, even to himself. There are reports that he was asked by Boris Johnson to chair the COP26 environmental summit in Glasgow this November, but all Cameron could say was “too soon”. Now that the UK really has left the European Union, any remaining hope that what is regarded as his abiding disastrous legacy might be reversed have evaporated.

Obviously pro-Europeans and what was left of the centrist wing of his party resented his unforced error of the 2016 vote (in their view). Yet Cameron is treated with contempt universally, even by those who have profited from his mistakes. Dominic Cummings, now the most powerful man in government (some claim), and the brains behind the 2016 referendum win and the 2019 general election, derides Cameron’s decision to hold the EU referendum in his celebrated blog: “Cameron never had to offer the referendum in the first place. His sudden U-turn was a classic example of how his Downing Street operation lurched without serious thought in response to media pressure, not because of junior people but because of Cameron himself and his terrible choice of two main advisers.” His rudeness towards Cameron doesn’t end there – he “did not understand many basic features of how the world works”. For his part Cameron labelled Cummings a “career psychopath” and banned him from Whitehall during the coalition government. We all know, too, that Boris Johnson regards his fellow Old Etonian as a “girly swot”.

Danny Dyer put things most pithily on Good Evening Britain a couple of years ago, and many felt he spoke for the nation: “So what’s happened to that t*** David Cameron who called it on? Let’s be fair, how come he can scuttle off. He called all this on, where is he? In Europe, in Nice, with his trotters up. Where is the geezer? I think he should be held to account for it. T***.”