Enemies of Tories will relish this backbiting
Who will be most pleased by the publication of David Cameron’s autobiography? Well, with the opportunity to tell his side of the story, he should be pretty happy.
Some Remainers are doubtless delighted to see Mr Cameron rip into Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. The egregious Alastair Campbell, former Blairite spin doctor and champion of a second referendum, has extolled aspects of the book.
But otherwise I don’t think the nation at large will be overjoyed by this surprisingly rancorous and divisive tome, and I’m quite sure most members of the Tory party will be aghast.
We are at a perilous point in negotiations. Mr Johnson’s majority is more than minus 40. he has expelled, probably unwisely, 21 MPs.
The last thing anyone wants – anyone, that is, apart from Remainers plotting to undo Brexit and further bind the PM’s hands – is a vengeful broadside delivered by a man still fighting the battles of more than three years ago.
What amazes me is that this normally emollient, calm and well mannered person should have been transformed into someone intent on settling old scores.
Boris Johnson comes in for a drubbing, with an overwrought Mr Cameron suggesting he ‘didn’t believe’ in Brexit and backed the Leave campaign only to ‘help his political career’.
If the PM gets a rough ride, the slightly unhinged garden shed scribe reserves his bitterest comments for Michael Gove. his one-time ally is dismissed as ‘mendacious’ and ‘disloyal’ and a ‘foam-flecked Faragist’. As Mr Cameron himself once said in the Commons: ‘Calm down, dear!’
It’s true that, in the case of Mr Gove, Mr Cameron grants he probably believed in the Leave cause he embraced. Mr Gove is nonetheless castigated for his disloyalty. But didn’t he owe a greater loyalty to his country than its leader?
No one would complain if the former PM had tried to skewer former colleagues through sober and reasoned argument. It is the hyperbole and name-calling that is depressing. of
course, lies were told on the Leave side – as they were by Remainers. Mr Cameron rightly complains about the notorious slogan on the side of the Brexit bus suggesting that if we left the EU, a further £350million a week could be spent on the NhS. he doesn’t admit, though, that the probable weekly saving of £250million is huge.
on the other hand, he shows – at any rate in the excerpts so far published – scant understanding of enormous public disquiet over unprecedentedly high levels of immigration during his time in office.
All in all, this is not the measured and statesmanlike book of a man esteemed as a ‘class act’ while in power. Months brooding in that garden shed have warped his judgment.
There could have been little objection if he had discharged this missile
after the issue of Brexit was resolved and the nightmare of a Corbyn government averted. In that case, we would have merely marvelled that beneath Mr Cameron’s suave exterior beats an astonishingly tempestuous heart.
Admirably, he initially agreed to postpone publication until after March 29 – when Britain was supposed to leave the EU – so as not to embarrass Theresa May. Presumably under pressure from tired-of-waiting publishers, he has now placed a bombshell under Mr Johnson. For there can be little doubt that his intemperate language about the leadership of the current administration will deepen old wounds in an already stricken Tory party, and worsen long-standing divisions over Europe.
AND, at the same time, his assault on Mr Johnson, Mr Gove and others is bound to give comfort to extreme Remainers who are doing their damnedest to discredit the Prime Minister and the Government.
During their party conferences, Lib Dem and Labour delegates will endlessly quote Mr Cameron’s highly negative judgment of Mr Johnson, and use it to weaken him and undermine his policies.
So in reply to the question as to who will be most pleased by this book, my answer is: Those who wish the Tory party ill, and long to scupper Brexit.