United Kingdom: Why Cameron can’t save the Tories
With the shock appointment of David Cameron as foreign secretary last week, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is seeking to reboot his flailing government, said John Rentoul in The Independent. Cameron, who as a Conservative prime minister from 2010 to 2016 pandered to the Right by agreeing to hold the Brexit referendum, had retired in disappointment after British voters rejected his plea to remain in the European Union and was no longer a member of Parliament. To return to office, therefore, he had to be hastily made a baron, which gave him a seat in the House of Lords. But can “Lord Cameron of Remainville” help Sunak woo centrists? His appointment “feels like a lurch to the center, which is always the right instinct in politics, but it also feels like a lurch to the past, which is usually a mistake.” He led the Remain camp, so the Leave camp doesn’t like him—but then Remainers don’t either, as they blame him for allowing the vote in the first place. And as foreign secretary? “It seems odd to put relations with the European Union in the hands of the person who fought and lost the referendum.”
Sunak had to do something, said Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer. His government was floundering in disarray after his hard-right home secretary, the now sacked Suella Braverman, wrote an angry tract accusing police of bias in refusing to prevent a pro-Palestinian rally. She managed to break two cardinal rules of British governance at the same time, “that politicians don’t issue operational orders to the police” and that they don’t interfere with the right to protest. But Cameron brings his own baggage, said Fiona Hamilton and George Greenwood in The Times, in the form of “troubling questions” about his business deals and foreign links. He was the architect of the disastrous pivot to China, in which the U.K. sucked up to the Chinese by joining a new Asian investment bank and got nothing but humiliation in return. After he left office, Cameron went to China to promote his China-U.K. investment fund and raked in large fees for giving fawning speeches. He also lobbied former colleagues on behalf of a dodgy bank in which he held a personal economic interest, an offense a parliamentary inquiry said showed “significant lack of judgment.”
Nor does his domestic record inspire confidence, said Robert Shrimsley in the Financial Times. As prime minister, Cameron “presided over a series of policy disasters that scar the U.K. to this day,” including an austerity program that “hollowed out public services” and left the National Health Service fatally illprepared for the pandemic. Even if we wanted him back, the timing is terrible. An election is coming up that the Tories, in power for the past 13 years, are sure to lose, yet with Cameron in government the right wing of the party can blame the defeat on centrists rather than on their own failures. Sunak must think that if he appoints someone so experienced, voters won’t notice that he himself is unfit for his job, said Stephen Daisley in The Spectator. “This is not genius, it is desperation.”