The self-serving memoirs of david cameron | thearticle

I’m guessing that the lawyers who are on a retainer for the Brexit Party were put on standby the minute David Cameron deployed his memoirs in a shock-and-awe encounter with Tory High

Command. Our former PM has compared Michael Gove to a “foam flecked Faragist”? Farage has been called many things in the past – not least by Mr Cameron – but surely the comparison to Gove

was a libel too far? Mr Gove, whose very impressive backstory has now been overtaken by an increasingly preposterous front-story, was recently moved by Boris Johnson into a “less visible

role” at the Cabinet Office. His (cough) unique presentational skills seem to have degraded in the harsh light of recent scrutiny. A nation of satirists wept. Mr Gove offers up a sort of

writers’ alchemy. Cameron is certainly settling scores. He describes Boris Johnson in terms usually available only to a former romantic partner (a flexible demographic the case of Mr

Johnson). Our current PM, apparently, is somebody who used the 2016 Referendum as a vehicle for self-advancement. To which the necessary reply is: so what if he did? I suspect that Mr

Cameron’s own career trajectory is not marked at each point by an obvious commitment to purely selfless service. Does it really matter? But now that Cameron is on the record as suggesting a

substantive connection between the personal and the political, let’s have some fun with it. We are in a mess because of (at least) two things: the referendum he promised and the failure of

the entitled class to implement its result. Cameron made an attempt to (as the impartial Scottish judges say, in strict legalese) “stymie” the possibility of a referendum by going to

Brussels in 2015 and attempting a renegotiation of our membership terms. The result of that was not impressive. How to describe the fruits of this negotiation? Let’s do it in Bullingdon Club

terms: think of the drunken undergraduate who walks into the late night takeaway, pays, and then does a “runner” before the food arrives. And then boasts about it. And then is resentful

because, several years later, he is still being laughed at. Now we’ve had the fun let’s do the serious bit. It is characteristically disingenuous of the media to exploit Cameron’s personal

resentments and dress them in the clothes of actual argument. There is a thing called the genetic fallacy: to explain why someone believes (or does) something is not to explain the truth (or

rightness) of what they believe or do. Why someone believes something is important if you are interested in why they believe it, but it should be of no interest at all to someone who is

assessing whether or not what they believe is true. Some people “believe in God” because they were forced to attend Mass twice a week. Some people deny God for the same reason – so what? God

remains above the fray, head firmly in hands. Similarly, evolutionary psychologists attempt to dissolve human altruism into their confused version of biological adaptation – that says

nothing about the real articulations and obligations of human selflessness, which are always immediate to the awareness of the truly moral person. So: do you actually care whether or not

Johnson came around to Euroscepticism on the basis of some unknowable personal calculation? Does it matter? God, I think, has a sense of humour. Its manifestation is in the deployment of

morally flawed human beings (including you and I) in order to do his work. St Paul did not lead an ethically unambiguous life before the Damascene ambush. Cameron’s memoirs express the usual

petty Etonian jealousies and represent them in a national form. He actually thinks we should be interested. For these people the state of the nation is a sort of theatre, in which their own

agency is assumed, and real divisions about the direction of the play reduce to some petty complaint about who has been given the best role. Cameron’s language, the casual call to being

offended, discloses the following irony: that Cameron actually seems to think that history is determined by the personal and he’ll say so in defence of a European theology which sees itself

as the protector of a version of historical determinism. The EU “Project” assimilates to itself all mechanisms of interpretation both of the past and of the future. The EU’s ultimate aim is

the dissolution of national identity, and therefore of the relevance of the actors on the political stages of its member states. It’s almost funny that the Remain Tyrants, addicted as they

are to the oxygen of their personal publicity, will end up being the last to see this. Every Revolution consumes its enablers. And now the courts have been offered at least a producer but

maybe even a director responsibility in the grotesque Brexit Tragedy. The genetic fallacy was alive last week in the excitable mind of the Scottish judiciary when those judges presumed – in

a reversal of the principle of mens rea – that they would evaluate the state of mind of the defendant (Mr Johnson) and then decide whether a crime had been committed, rather than determine

whether a crime had been committed and then argue about the state of mind of the accused. Or to put it another way, to conjure a crime from nowhere on the basis of unprovable conjectures

about a person’s intentions. David Cameron’s “memoirs” are no more than a soap opera script in a context where real insight would have been welcome. Our country chose a path. The

Establishment is forcing us into the woods.