Blaming populism is the mark of a loser

INVOKING the fashionable, sneering buzzword of the political class, David Cameron (remember him?) tells a US university audience that he was brought down by the forces of ‘populism’. He still doesn’t get it, does he?

To set the record straight, he lost the EU referendum because the electorate whose intelligence he insulted simply didn’t trust his judgment. And with good reason.

Indeed, throughout his six years in Downing Street, Mr Cameron made huge mistakes, yielding so readily to his arrogant Lib Dem Coalition partners that he often seemed far more in tune with them than with voters.

Apparently more interested in wind farms and gay marriage than addressing the public’s pressing concerns – whether about mass immigration, wasted foreign aid or the human rights racket – he came across increasingly as part of an out-oftouch, ‘we know best’ elite.

Yes, he deserves credit for keeping the economy on the rails (though at horrendous cost in Government debt). But let’s face it, he owed his Tory majority in 2015 largely to his extraordinary luck in finding himself up against the unelectable Ed Miliband.

Then came his appalling misjudgments over the referendum. Leave aside the suspicion that he promised it only as a cynical ploy to quell eurosceptic unrest in his party, convinced that the country would vote Remain or the Lib Dems would veto any ballot under a future Coalition.

If only Mr Cameron had been straight with the public, he could have survived. As soon as it became clear that our EU partners would offer no meaningful concessions whatever, he could have told voters he was sadly unable to recommend the renegotiated deal.

Instead, he treated the public like idiots, pretending he had secured a triumph, while insulting us further with the infantile hysteria of Project Fear.

Only now does he tell his American audience (in return for a rumoured £120,000 fee) that he wonders how long the euro can last, after inflicting ‘decades of lost growth’ on countries shackled to the onesize-fits-all currency.

This paper does not recall him issuing any such warning during the referendum campaign, when he was extolling all things European.

A victim of ‘populism’? No. Like Hillary Clinton in the US and Matteo Renzi in Italy, who also took voters for granted, Mr Cameron can blame only his own hubris for his woes. He was brought down by democracy.