Cameron redux

Although it’s a few months now since we looked at the fortunes of Britain’s Conservative government, things haven’t improved for it in that time. Prime minister Rishi Sunak still has a year before he needs to go to an election, but his position in the opinion polls is woeful, trailing Labour by around twenty points. And his party is its usual ungovernable self, with right-wing home secretary Suella Braverman being a particular thorn in his side, leading ultimately to her dismissal earlier this week.

But while her departure was no surprise, the next move was. In the ensuing reshuffle, Sunak brought back former prime minister David Cameron – now to be Lord Cameron – to join the cabinet as foreign secretary. It doesn’t look as if anyone saw this coming; most pundit reaction has been negative, but it has at least served the short-term goal of pushing Braverman and her criticisms off the front page.

Long-term readers will know that I am something of an admirer of Cameron. His tenure at the top ended unhappily, but I think he was largely the victim of bad luck. He believed that he could win the referendum on staying in the European Union (a belief shared by most of the commentators who then blamed him for the result), but he underestimated the rising power of the populist right. His alternatives at the time, though, were severely limited: refusing to hold a referendum would have meant the destruction of his government, and it seemed a risk worth taking.

The landscape has changed a great deal since then, even though it’s only seven and a half years ago. With Cameron gone, the lunatics took over the asylum; a succession of Tory leaders tried to outdo one another in pandering to their xenophobic backbench. Finally, after the implosion of Liz Truss’s government a year ago, a degree of sanity was restored with the election unopposed of Sunak as leader – but only after the rules had been changed to reduce the role of the rank-and-file members.

Sunak patched up relations with the EU and got the budget back under control, but that wasn’t enough to turn his political position around. With limited time remaining, he has now decided he needs something more drastic; there’s no point in worrying that it might make things worse, because business as usual is heading for disaster anyway. Noah Millman offers a good explanation of the basic idea (he’s talking about Al-Qa’eda and Vladimir Putin, but the point is a general one):

In finance terms, [he] held a basket of options that were very far out of the money. If that’s what your portfolio looks like, it is rational to pursue strategies to dramatically increase the volatility of the assets underlying your options even if those strategies have a negative expected value, because incremental increases in those assets’ value won’t be enough. Your only hope of winding up in the money is if something changes radically, and fast.

What’s really interesting about Cameron’s return is what it says about the ideological situation of the Conservative Party. Last year, Stephen Davies analysed its supporters into three groups: Cameronites (pro-market and socially liberal), Thatcherites (pro-market and socially conservative) and populists (anti-market and socially conservative). After noting that the Cameronites were “in the process of abandoning the party” for the Liberal Democrats, I commented as follows:

Davies describes Sunak as Cameronite rather than Thatcherite, but I’m not convinced this is right. He supported Brexit in the 2016 referendum and has never disowned that view, even though, for want of anything better, he now has the support of the party’s remaining anti-Brexiters. Signs of social liberalism on his part are fairly thin …

Now, however, Sunak has made a real move in the Cameronite direction. Cameron represents everything that the populists hate: not just cosmopolitanism, social tolerance and sound finance, but also taking government seriously. Politics for him was about actually governing (if not always doing it well), not just trolling.

Knowing what we do about the Tory Party, the natural assumption is that the whole exercise is doomed to failure. Yet Cameron somehow made it work for more than ten years, six of them in government. Sunak hopes that some of the magic will rub off on him; it seems unlikely, but he has nothing to lose.

James Robertson, looking for an Australian angle, likened it to the appointment of Bob Carr as foreign minister in 2012, when the Gillard government was on the ropes. In ideological terms, however, it’s more like the return of Malcolm Turnbull to the Liberal leadership in 2015. That ended badly, as he was unable or unwilling to challenge his party’s drift to the hard right; most probably, a similar fate awaits Sunak and Cameron. But time will tell.