Cameron “the bored viceroy”
Inside Europe: Ten Years of Turmoil (BBC2)
THE best line ever written about David Cameron was by funnyman Frankie Boyle, who described him as “a sort of bored viceroy engaged in the handover of power from government to corporations”.
We haven’t seen much of the bored viceroy since his decision to call a referendum resulted in the handover of power from government to whatever is going on in Westminster at this time. But he could be seen again in the first episode of Inside Europe: Ten Years of Turmoil, moving inexorably towards his doom and that of his unfortunate country.
Already Cameron is an historical figure, even as the horrors which he unleashed are still not fully formed. Already we know that his name will forever be associated with this almighty shambles which he brought into being, because... because he was bored?
Certainly this documentary, which brings us very close to the main characters, shows us a Cameron who now seems slightly more posh than we remembered him — I mean, we always knew he was a toff, but watching him up close, if anything it seems that we may have underestimated this aspect of his game.
In these scenes, just before the Fall of the United Kingdom, he is tremendously well mannered, and his grooming is sleeker than I recall it. Yet he seems to be constantly trying to exude this sense of vigour, of virility, puffing himself up to strike the desired note of statesmanship — like he has to remember to make the effort, because deep down he doesn’t actually believe in anything, and finds the whole business of arguing with the leaders of other countries to be essentially distasteful.
And it is admittedly difficult for men of his kind to believe in anything, or at least anything that might benefit other members of the human race — that they are involved in “public service” at all is probably enough of a sacrifice, without engaging in such abstractions.
Indeed they are already so privileged, perhaps the only thing that can adversely affect them in some material way, is a disturbance in their own party — so throughout this episode, there is really nothing much bothering Cameron, apart from fears about the Tory “Eurosceptics”. His colleague William Hague explains the need to deal with this problem, not as some philosophical matter which needed to be settled in order to benefit the general public, but because the alternative might be “a Labour government”.
Thus, all this trouble is the result of men such as Cameron and Hague con- templating the unimaginable horror that someone other than themselves might be in government.
Now, if Cameron did believe that there was such a thing as the common good, which is not exactly the same thing as his own good, and that of his party, he would have seen these far right Tory nationalists who hate “Europe”, as enemies to be crushed.
He would not have given them their referendum, he would have worked with all that pumped-up vigour of his, to pulverise them.
But he doesn’t believe in anything of that nature — moreover he had the fatal weakness of the PR man who assumes there is nothing that can’t be spun, that he could sell the EU to the great unwashed without really trying too hard.
And I should add that our leaders are also public schoolboys, with a similarly restricted range of interests. And a similar belief in the power of, shall we say, presentation.
Then again, next week this series will cover the EU’s disgraceful treatment of Greece, and some will say that that confirmed everything that the Brexiteers were saying about the Eurocrats — but of course it did not. It merely confirmed what reasonable people might find offensive, the Brexiteers already hated even the great things about the EU.
As for poor Cameron, the bored viceroy engaged in the handover of power from government to corporations — even the corporations are leaving.