Cameron’s Project Fear was the real lie in the Brexit vote
IN his long-anticipated memoirs, serialised over the weekend, David Cameron reveals that the Brexit vote in 2016 came as a hammer blow to his inner circle. So great was the shock that his wife Samantha had to pour herself “a stiff gin” at ten past eight in the morning before she could face the media in Downing Street when he announced his resignation immediately after the referendum result.
But that mixture of bewilderment, anger and despair just illustrates how out of touch Cameron was from a majority of the British public. The vote was a surprise to him because, like most of the political class, he inhabited a bubble where acceptance of EU rule went unchallenged.
He repeatedly writes in his book that “he failed” over the referendum, but by far his greatest failure was his blinkered inability to understand the feelings of an electorate fed-up with Brussels bullying and the erosion of our independence.
Born to privilege, insulated by wealth, and attached to the conventional progressive ideology, Cameron was the embodiment of the liberal metropolitan elite, which alienated so many voters with its disdain for the national interest. His outlook explains why the sections in the book about Brexit are enveloped in gloom. “I deeply regret the outcome,” he writes.
RATHER than seeing Britain’s withdrawal as an opportunity to embrace an exciting new era of freedom, he views our departure as a national calamity that has left him “hugely depressed”.
In one nauseating passage, he even records how he phoned President Obama to apologise for the result. For him, our future outside the Brussels bureaucracy will be a bleak one: “I worry desperately about what is going to happen next. It’s painful for the country.”
His despondent attitude also accounts for his visceral bitterness
towards his former colleagues who dared to support the Leave cause. Cameron is scathing about Boris Johnson, whom he claims only backed Brexit for careerist reasons. He argues Johnson was “appallingly” manipulative, particularly over the controversial accusation that Britain forked out £350million-a-week to Brussels. Boris, he writes, “left the truth at home”.
Cameron is just as vicious about other prominent Leavers, including Priti Patel, the current Home Secretary, who supposedly engaged in warfare against her own Government.
But he reserves his greatest hostility for his former close friend Michael Gove, who is venomously condemned for his “disloyalty” and dishonesty.
In fact, Cameron seems to think that the entire Leave campaign was built on lies. Yet this is both fatuous and hypocritical. For a start, that charge reflects the fashionable, snobbish Remainer belief that Leave voters were just a mass of brainwashed sheep and easily influenced by bogus propaganda.
BUT the real deceit came from Cameron and the pro-EU brigade. They peddled the apocalyptic Project Fear, whose emptiness has been exposed by the continuing resilience of the economy since 2016.
They also tried to hype the reform package that Cameron negotiated with EU leaders in advance of the referendum, when in fact his cosmetic deal just proved both the intransigence of Brussels and its refusal to be swayed from its dogmatic goal of ever-closer union.
Cameron now wails that the
Leavers unfairly made an issue of Turkey’s potential membership of the EU, but in truth, he was a noisy supporter of this policy. Soon after he became PM in 2010, he said he wanted to help Turkey “pave the road from Ankara to Brussels”.
In his book, he expresses his regret that during the campaign he did not focus more on “the very real achievements” of the EU.What, precisely, did he have in mind? Worsening economic sclerosis? Colossal debts? The destruction of national identities and democracies?
Remainers like him blather about the decades of peace that the EU has brought to Europe, but that has really been secured by Nato. The obsession of Brussels with open borders is a vehicle for terrorism and chaos.
A patently decent man, Cameron was not a bad premier. He revived the Tory party, rebuilt the economy and handled the Coalition with skill. Nor was the EU referendum a mistake. Given the extent of the Eurozone and migration crises, it was right to put Britain’s membership to the democratic test. But where Cameron and other Remainers have been wrong is in their doom-laden interpretation of the result.
It is their stubborn antipathy that is making a paralysed mess of our national liberation.
‘He reserves his greatest hostility for the disloyalty of Michael Gove’