David Cameron re-enters politics under close scrutiny after lobbying Rishi Sunak in the Greensill scandal
The last time David Cameron stood in Downing Street with the eyes of the nation upon him, he was heard humming a spirited tune as he stepped away from resigning as prime minister following the loss of the Brexit referendum.
Some seven years later, the former Conservative leader could have been forgiven for composing himself a newly cheery ditty as he once more strolled purposefully to the door of No 10 and secured his comeback to the Cabinet table.
His appointment as foreign secretary sees (now Lord) Cameron join a rarified club of 15 former prime ministers since the 1700s who have returned to government in a different role. It is perhaps a measure of how this sort of high office manoeuvering has fallen out of fashion, that the last time an ex-PM served under a successor was 53 years ago when Ted Heath appointed Alec Douglas-Home as his foreign secretary in 1970.
The return of the famously pragmatic ex-premier will doubtless be seen in Downing Street as the restoration of a seasoned Tory heavyweight to the frontline of both party and global affairs. In so doing, the party is also likely to see itself as binding the wounds left by Brexit, which many see the new foreign secretary as having inflicted on British politics with his referendum on leaving the European Union in 2016.
But while Lord Cameron’s appointment doubtless offers advantages for No 10, it also arguably opens something of a Pandora’s box of perils and questions, ranging from his role in the Greensill lobbying scandal – whereby he lobbied his now new boss Rishi Sunak to change Treasury rules to allow financing firm Greensill Capital to join a Covid-19 loans scheme – to the fact that the man who famously declared a “golden era” in Anglo-Chinese relations will be in charge of enforcing Britain’s now somewhat less gilt-edged approach to Beijing.
Lord Cameron was cleared by three separate enquiries into the Greensill affair of breaking any lobbying rules or acting unlawfully when in 2020 – several months before the collapse of the finance house from which he earned a reported £7m in salary and shares – he sent a number of text messages to Mr Sunak, then Chancellor, asking for the company to be enlisted in the Covid Corporate Financing Facility. The approaches were eventually rebuffed but the links between Lord Cameron and Lex Greensill, the Australian financier behind the firm, raised uncomfortable questions for the former prime minister about his apparent willingness to use personal contacts to further the cause of a company in which he had a stake.
The result is that the new Foreign Secretary will enter his office in what is Whitehall’s grandest bastion of state with his diplomatic record under close scrutiny. After he put Britain at the forefront of the Western intervention in Libya in 2011, resulting in the bloody removal of quixotic dictator Muammar Gaddafi, Lord Cameron was ultimately heavily criticised for the North African country’s descent into a state of internecine violence and collapse.
In a scathing report published a day after Lord Cameron announced his abrupt resignation as an MP in September 2016, MPs found that he was “ultimately responsible” for Britain’s failure to develop a coherent strategy in Libya – a failure which they said had, among other things, fuelled terrorism in the region. The Foreign Affairs Select Committee report said it agreed with the blunt verdict of former American president Barack Obama that the intervention had been “a shitshow”.
The Eton-educated son of an investment banker, Lord Cameron is nonetheless born under something of a lucky star. He can trace his lineage to William IV and is thereby distantly related to King Charles. After attaining a first class degree at Oxford University, he decided to embrace politics and on the day of his interview with Conservative Central Office, the party famously received a phone call from an unknown figure in Buckingham Palace informing them that they were “about to meet a truly remarkable young man”.
It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that the former prime minister is uncomfortable with having his privileged background highlighted. He has expressed embarrassment at his membership of – alongside Eton contemporary Boris Johnson, among others – the Bullingdon Club, the Oxford all-male private dining club known for the wealth and boorish behaviour of its members.
And yet, his contemporaries also speak of him as one of the brightest and ablest political minds of his generation. His supporters point to successes ranging from his detoxifying of the Conservative brand after becoming leader in 2005 and leading the party back to government in 2010 to a social liberalism which saw him pioneer green policies and face down opposition within Tory ranks to legalise gay marriage. He later said that the introduction of same-sex marriage was one of his proudest moments inside No 10.
Against the political instability generated by the Brexit referendum, he can point to the victory achieved two years earlier in the Scottish independence vote with the assistance of, among others, pro-union Labour politicians and a judicious intervention from the late Queen as evidence of a certain ability to unite others in a common cause.
As Lord Cameron himself once put it: “I’m a practical person and pragmatic. I know where I want to get to, but I am not ideologically attached to one particular method.”
It is this Teflon-coated talent for goal-driven flexibility, including presumably the small matter of winning elections, which will doubtless have informed the deliberations inside No 10 about whether or not to invite the former prime minister back into the corridors of power.
But just how long even Lord Cameron will have to help bring about the change in his party’s fortunes that Mr Sunak clearly hopes he can achieve remains to be seen.
