David Cameron Wants You to Remember Him for More Than Just Brexit

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- In May 2015, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron collapsed into the back seat of his armored car with his wife, Samantha, and wept with relief. He’d just pulled off a political miracle, defying the odds to win an outright majority for his Conservative Party in the general election. It was, he told his team, “the sweetest victory” of his career.

The taste of that triumph turned to dust a year later when British voters rejected his impassioned appeal to remain within the European Union and chose to leave in the Brexit referendum. It’s this catastrophic defeat, which promptly ended his career, that’s defined Cameron’s premiership.

The charge most often leveled against him is that he gambled with Britain’s future to resolve an internal party split over Europe and lost. In his autobiography, For the Record (Harper, $40), Cameron offers an absorbing, and sometimes irritable, response.

He says his mission in the book is to “correct the record” where he thinks it’s wrong. This makes for a text that’s frequently defensive and occasionally resentful as he settles old scores. But it also provides startling insight into the characters of two of the current government’s most senior figures: Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, his fellow pro-Brexit campaigner, who’s now preparing the logistics for the break with the EU. Cameron accuses Johnson and Gove of leading a pro-Brexit campaign that lied to win.

It’s an extraordinary allegation for a former prime minister to make against an incumbent. Johnson has batted away the claims without properly denying them, but Cameron’s verdict is withering: “Boris had backed something he didn’t believe in,” he writes of Johnson’s conversion to the pro-Brexit cause, while Gove, he adds, had been spectacularly disloyal to Cameron. “Both had then behaved appallingly, attacking their own government, turning a blind eye to their side’s unpleasant actions and becoming ambassadors for the expert-trashing, truth-twisting age of populism.”

Cameron has known Johnson since their days at Eton College, the country’s most famous boarding school. According to Cameron, Johnson has a propensity for outbursts of physical exuberance that border on the eccentric. He plays “wildly unorthodox” tennis and is “extremely competitive”—he tackled his own child so hard in a soccer match that he injured the kid. Once, Johnson forgot to let go of Cameron’s hand when he raised it aloft in triumph after he was elected mayor of London. They held hands for some time.

Cameron spends just 50 pages of his 700-page book on the toxic Brexit campaign. He prefers to dwell on his successes in office—reducing the budget deficit, reforming schools, and legislating for same-sex marriage.

He also relishes gossip and has an ear for an entertaining anecdote from the top table of world politics (though his taste in jokes won’t be shared by everyone). He recalls then-Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi showing him an ancient two-way mirror in the bedroom of his official residence: “They didn’t have porn channels in the fifteenth century,” Berlusconi explained.

It’s impossible not to be moved by the account of Cameron’s son Ivan, who suffered from severe epilepsy and cerebral palsy, and died at age 6 while Cameron was leader of the U.K.’s main opposition party. The family had to grieve in the public eye, and the constant pressures on their shared private life come across powerfully.

Yet to many, none of these peripheral stories will matter in light of Brexit, which is now hurtling toward its climax: The U.K. is due to exit the EU on Oct. 31. Cameron’s wounds are still raw and seem to cloud his ability to reconcile his failings. Although he got things wrong, there’s always a “but.”

He accepts he made mistakes and “failed.” But he insists it was right to call the referendum. He’s clear his renegotiation of Britain’s relationship with the EU in the months leading up to it wasn’t enough, but he still thinks it was as good a deal as anyone could get.

Finally, Cameron acknowledges that he went back on his promise not to resign but says he believed Britain needed a new leader. “I haven’t changed my mind since,” Cameron writes. There’s little in his book to make readers change theirs.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Chris Rovzar at crovzar@bloomberg.net, James Tarmy

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