Bye Bye Cameron

NO ONE is going to shed a tear, least of all from our ranks, at the departure of former premier David Cameron from the political stage.

Cameron may not have flaunted his wealth in office but he certainly flaunted his privileged background. At university Cameron was a member of an exclusive club of parasites known for drunken binges and the trashing of restaurants, not to mention allegations of strange initiation ceremonies involving pigs. Some would, perhaps, draw a veil over such youthful indiscretions. This Eton and Oxford man wore his membership of the Bullingdon Club as a badge of honour.

David Cameron was Prime Minister from May 2010 to July 2016, firstly at the head of a Coalition Government in alliance with the Liberal Democrats and finally as an outright Tory leader after winning the general election last year.

Cameron would like to have been remembered as the man who headed off the Scottish drive for independence during the referendum campaign in 2014 to lead the Tories to victory in 2015.

But he will simply be recalled, if at all, as just another Tory politician forced into early retirement over internal divisions within the Conservative Party over the European Union (EU). The Tory Eurosceptics were instrumental in the fall of both Margaret Thatcher and John Major, though Tory leaders from their own camp fared no better when they lost three elections on the bounce during the Blair era.

As the maverick Tory MP Enoch Powell once said: “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.” Although Powell may have been thinking of himself it clearly applies equally to every post-war Tory leader including their iconic war-time leader Winston Churchill and, of course, David Cameron.