David Cameron’s Desperate Return to British Politics
The default move by Britain’s Conservative Party, when in trouble, is to summon a posh bloke.
In the end, Suella Braverman was brought down by some tents. Or, rather, the absence of them. On November 4, Britain’s home secretary endorsed the idea of banning homelessness charities from giving out tents to people sleeping on sidewalks. Britain was blighted, she said on X, by aggressive panhandlers and vagrants, “many of them from abroad, living on the streets as a lifestyle choice.” Without harsh measures, “British cities will go the way of places in the US like San Francisco and Los Angeles.” She followed up the comments a few days later by suggesting that all of the estimated 300,000 people protesting in London for a cease-fire in Gaza were “hate marchers.”
Yesterday, she was fired from her post by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, in a cabinet reshuffle indicating his Conservative Party’s attempt to calibrate exactly how much culture-warring British voters can tolerate. Her resignation letter accused Sunak of pandering to “polite opinion” and having “no appetite for doing what is necessary.” Braverman was one of the standard-bearers of the Tory right: tough on immigration, tough on welfare, and a true-blue Brexiteer. But her comments on homelessness were widely seen as cruel, as well as incomprehensible to many of the party’s target voters. Even if the online right holds up San Francisco and Los Angeles as totems of progressive failure, to most Britons those cities are “the one with the trams” and “the one where all the famous people live.” Polling showed that Braverman’s rhetoric was unpopular with the electorate, and so was she.
As she was exiled from government, the Conservative former Prime Minister David Cameron returned as foreign secretary. This was a shock to almost everyone: He’d left Parliament in 2016 after losing the Brexit referendum, and now—at the same time as joining Sunak’s government—will become Lord Cameron, sitting in the (unelected) House of Lords rather than the (elected) House of Commons. He has spent the intervening years writing his memoirs, making money through lobbying, and watching the reality of Brexit become clear.
Cameron is associated with an earlier era of Toryism—one that sold itself on compassion, patrician competence, and social liberalism, even as it embraced big cuts to public spending. “Imagine a world where Nikki Haley, having successfully succeeded Donald Trump without an intervening election, fired J. D. Vance as Attorney General and appointed George W. Bush as her Secretary of State, and that’s roughly this week in British conservatism,” wrote the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat on X. That pretty much captures the sense of an old order reasserting itself. Cameron, who seemed so young when he became prime minister at 43, now looks like a world-weary professor standing next to Sunak, the enthusiastic freshman.
With Cameron’s return, the four great offices of state—prime minister, chancellor, foreign secretary, and home secretary—are now held by four men who went to exclusive private schools, although in a concession to the 21st century, two of them are racial minorities. One way to see the reshuffle is that Cameron’s gifts as a statesman and communicator were wasted in lucrative obscurity and that his return, as another Tory grandee has argued, demonstrates “Sunak’s desire for rational, respectful politics that can lure back disillusioned voters.” Another way to see the events of this week is as proof that the default move by the Conservative Party, when in trouble, is to summon a posh bloke.
And wow, is the Conservative Party in trouble. It has now been in power since 2010 and has cycled through five prime ministers in that time, including one who lasted just 49 days. Only No. 2, Theresa May, resigned after losing an election; the others were felled by Conservative psychodrama. Cameron quit after losing the Brexit vote he was bounced into by the Tory right, whereas Boris Johnson and Liz Truss went after their own ministers decided that they were a liability. That has had unfortunate consequences. When a leader is sent packing by the voters, their failure is unarguable (unless you’re Donald Trump). But when a leader is knifed by their own colleagues, it creates new fissures and new grudges, and fertile ground for conspiracy theories. Before the reshuffle, the big news in British politics was a truly unhinged book by former Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries—think of her as our Marjorie Taylor Greene, only with romance novels instead of CrossFit—that railed against her fellow Conservatives for bringing down Johnson. She attributed his downfall to a group she called “The Movement,” which her sources suggested was influenced variously by shadowy bureaucrats, Mossad, gay men, and a mysterious figure known only as “Dr. No.”
Despite the best efforts of Dr. No, the Conservatives have lagged far behind Keir Starmer’s Labour Party in the polls all year. Even Tory parliamentarians are quietly acknowledging that they expect to lose the next election—one little-remarked-upon subplot of the reshuffle was how many junior ministers stepped down voluntarily, either to devote themselves to defending their seats or to prepare for jobs in the private sector. More than 50 Tory members of Parliament, one-seventh of the party caucus, have already announced that they will not stand again.
The return of Cameron and the pivot to moderation suggests that the Tories think they have already lost the socially conservative voters of the northern-English towns they won at the last election and are now trying to shore up their traditional base in the more affluent, more liberal counties surrounding London. But even if they secure a mere defeat rather than a shellacking, the next election promises to be one of those generational turnovers in British politics, like Margaret Thatcher’s victory in 1979 or Tony Blair’s in 1997.
Faced with dire polls, the Conservative Party has entered what you might describe as the panda phase of an administration. Looking at it, you wonder: Does it even want to survive? Housing is one of the most acute issues in British politics—rents are sky-high, young people are stretching themselves to the limit to get on the property ladder, and mortgage costs have soared thanks to interest-rate rises. And yet, Sunak fired his well-liked housing minister yesterday—then struggled for hours to find a replacement. The economy remains sluggish, and inflation is still high. We are poorer than we tend to think we are. Talking to the party’s most stalwart defenders, you get a sense that they secretly yearn for a productive spell in opposition to work out how to address these problems, and to decide who they want their base to be.
While they’re stuck in government, however, this atmosphere of ennui and despair has allowed the culture wars to thrive. Until her exile, Braverman argued her points in a style that even some of her fellow right-wingers found crashingly unsubtle. This daughter of immigrants made opposition to immigration her central political theme, promising to “stop the boats” filled with asylum seekers crossing the English Channel. Although the policy itself was broadly popular, Braverman never found the right tone to describe it—she came to represent, as another Conservative politician once put it, “the nasty party.” She never understood how important the posh-bloke humor and bonhomie of both Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage were to softening the harsh Brexiteer rhetoric. (Farage, the Svengali of the Leave movement, developed such a personal following that he is currently starring in a reality-TV show known for making contestants eat kangaroo genitals.)
Dismissing Braverman and recalling Cameron is intended to reassure voters that the mainstream Conservatives are in charge again. As an advert might put it, this is your grandmother’s Tory party. Sunak has proved himself to be a poor communicator, and unlike Cameron, his privileged background does seem to prevent him from connecting with ordinary voters. His most recent set piece was interviewing Elon Musk in craven fashion, as if the billionaire was the world leader and he was a podcast host. In that conversation, Sunak managed to say both that “people should give up the security of a regular paycheck” to become entrepreneurs, and that they should be “comfortable failing.” When your financial security is assured through your marriage to a billionaire’s daughter, and your party is 20 points behind in the polls, statements like these make you sound like a parody of libertarianism. Come on, low-paid health-care assistants! What’s stopping you from getting into crypto? By contrast, David Cameron used to have a price list of everyday goods drawn up by his staff, in case he was asked the cost of a pint of milk. Reviving the Conservatives’ fortunes will require that kind of insight into their weaknesses, and that kind of discipline in addressing them.
Unfortunately, Cameron’s return is a sign of desperation as much as it is a soothing signal of the return to normalcy. Only a month ago, he was out criticizing one of Sunak’s biggest decisions—the scrapping of a planned high-speed rail line that was already billions over budget—while the prime minister was boasting that he would change “30 years of a political system that incentivizes the easy decision, not the right one.” Cameron now has to pretend that he thinks Sunak is making the right calls, and Sunak loses the ability to distance himself from the many failures of the Cameron years. Their political differences also directly affect the former prime minister’s new job: During his premiership, Cameron hailed a “golden era” of collaboration with Chinese businesses, but that era is very much over. The head of Britain’s security service, MI5, held a joint briefing with his American counterpart in the FBI last year to warn that such partnerships are vulnerable to corporate espionage. And that’s before we get to the weirdness of having a man who thought the country should remain in the European Union oversee Britain’s post-Brexit relationship with Europe.
If Britain’s Tory government really is a panda, then bringing back Cameron is the equivalent of those tragic scenes in which zookeepers smear themselves in animal urine and try to teach the babies how to eat bamboo. Here is a politician who knows how to win an election and how to communicate with the public, trying to teach someone constitutionally unsuited to those tasks. By calling in his predecessor, Rishi Sunak has conceded that he can’t survive in the wild.