Comeback kid Cameron
MAN IN A HURRY: EX-PREMIER ‘MAKING EVERY DAY COUNT’ AS UK’S TOP DIPLOMAT
➳ This is about ‘the rehabilitation of his image after Brexit’.
His legacy forever defined by Brexit, Britain’s former prime minister David Cameron is hurriedly restoring his reputation – and that of UK diplomacy – as a globe-trotting foreign secretary.
The 57-year-old has become a high-profile figure on the world stage again, visiting dozens of countries since his unexpected return last November from the political wilderness, which included a lobbying scandal.
With polls indicating Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s ruling Conservatives will lose a general election due this year, Cameron knows his time as Britain’s top diplomat is likely to be short – so he is making the most of it.
“I think this is partly about rehabilitation of his image after Brexit and after some of the things that happened when he left office,” said Simon Fraser, the top civil servant at the Foreign Office during Cameron’s premiership. “He’s a man with a personal mission.”
Cameron, who became prime minister in 2010, quit in July 2016 after his European Union referendum gamble backfired when Britons voted to leave the bloc. He retreated to a bespoke £25 000 (about R576 000) shepherd’s hut in his country garden to pen his memoirs as parliament wrangled over what Brexit would look like.
Cameron became embroiled in scandal in 2021 after lobbying the government for finance group Greensill Capital, which later collapsed.
He also endured flak for promoting a Chinese investment project, at a time when senior British lawmakers were calling for tougher action against Beijing.
“His reputation was being quite seriously tarnished,” just at the time Sunak brought him in from the cold, said Anand Menon, director of the UK in a Changing Europe think-tank.
“I’m sure there was a sense of unfinished business when he decided to take the job.”
His return to front-line British politics after more than seven years away stunned Westminster, with commentators and opposition lawmakers pointing out his mixed foreign policy record as prime minister.
They cited Britain’s failure to respond to a 2013 chemical attack blamed on Syrian forces and his leading role in an international intervention to topple Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, after which Libya plunged into crisis.
In a speech on Thursday, Cameron said he had been “determined to make every day count” of his six months as foreign secretary so far.
By his own tally, he has visited 33 countries across six continents, including Ukraine, Israel and the US, where he urged Donald Trump to persuade Republicans to unlock military aid to Kyiv.
Cameron became the first British foreign secretary to visit Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan and even turned up in the remote British overseas territory of the Falkland Islands. “He is a man in a hurry,” noted Fraser.
Allies say he is enjoying using the influence and contacts he made as prime minister, while civil servants credit him with injecting energy and gravitas into the foreign office following less serious predecessors like Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.
“He’s got the experience of key issues and he’s obviously got a sort of international reach and a network, which gives access as we saw with Trump,” said Fraser. –