sexta-feira, 24 de junho de 2016

David Cameron is finished. His failure over Europe will define his place in history


David Cameron is finished. His failure over Europe will define his place in history

James Kirkup 24 JUNE 2016

David Cameron is finished, heading for a place in history as the Prime Minister who gambled with Britain’s place in the European Union and his own career, and lost.

The only question left is how long Mr Cameron hangs on in the job, and that will be decided not by him but by his opponents within his party.

He is finished because the country has rejected his case on the biggest decision the UK has taken in a generation.

So ignore all that talk from Leave-backing Tories about letters of loyalty and wanting Mr Cameron to stay on. Ignore all Mr Cameron’s pre-referendum claims that he would stay on regardless of the result.

That’s just political game-playing, a matter of how to manage the first days and weeks of the new era of British history that starts today. An era that Mr Cameron never wanted to start.

The raw, brutal fact is that Mr Cameron asked the country to trust him on a question of the greatest importance, asking voters to put their trust in him over the future of their country. And those voters didn’t listen.

In fact, they did more than ignore Mr Cameron. In some cases, they took violent exception to his argument.

It doesn’t matter that the result was narrow. Mr Cameron called this vote and he lost it. He told Britain to remain in the EU, and Britain chose to leave. No prime minister can survive that.

Whatever his critics can say about him, even Mr Cameron’s worst enemies would concede that he is a man with a genuine sense of duty, a feeling that he has to do his best by the country, even if it has rejected him.

That sense of duty will inform what he does next.

It may be that his initial reaction is to talk about staying on to lead the country through the difficult decisions to come: when and how to begin the process of departure from the EU, and so on. And that may happen.

But those decisions will in reality be made by others: Boris Johnson and Michael Gove and other Leave-minded Tories will call the shots for Mr Cameron, even if he remains in office for a few weeks while the Conservative Party crowns his replacement.

Equally, it may be that Mr Cameron talks about trying to heal the divisions the referendum has revealed and created.

But many will feel that he bears much of the responsibility for those divisions, not least because of the way he chose to campaign for Remain, aggressively questioning the judgement and even the integrity of those who stood against him.

David Cameron's time in office - by numbersPlay! 01:04
As he contemplates the end of his premiership, it is worth recalling the bleak ironies of this outcome.

Mr Cameron became Conservative leader urging his party to stop “banging on” about Europe.

The issue was never one of the most important in politics for him.

It may have excited deep passion in other Tories, but Mr Cameron never saw it as much more than a problem to be managed, or perhaps deferred.

His European policy was a series of IOU notes, promises to his party to take dramatic action against the EU, but always tomorrow, not today: from withdrawing the Tories from the European People's Party to promising a referendum on the European Constitution, his approach was always to placate his party by promising action, then try to find a way not to deliver on that promise.

That strategy of defer and delay ended last year when he surprised even himself and won a full Commons majority, a victory that meant he had no excuse not to hold an EU referendum he always knew had the power to destroy him.


Today, some will ask: would he have called this election if he thought this would happen?

The question rests on a false premise, because Mr Cameron called this referendum fully aware that this could happen.

The pattern of the results makes the blow to Mr Cameron’s authority all the more grievous. Simply, he lost England and was left reliant on Scotland and London for support.

It is now clear that we can no longer speak of London as being part of England. The UK capital may sit geographically in England, but its political outlook, like its economy, is so widely different as to justify a different constitutional status. This is now the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and London.

And how long will that union remain in its current form?


For while Scotland may have agreed with Mr Cameron on the EU, by going against the UK verdict on Brexit, Scots have given the Scottish National Party the perfect case for another vote on independence.

Before this referendum, Mr Cameron’s proudest achievement was probably preserving the Union by winning the Scottish independence referendum in 2014.

He didn’t call that vote, but he chose to call the EU referendum.

And as a result of a referendum he chose to call, the future of the UK itself is now in doubt, since Scottish independence is now one of many existential issues back at the top of the political agenda.

Mr Cameron is already facing up to a place in history defined by defeat on Europe, the issue he never wanted to define his leadership.


But from his point of view, posterity’s verdict may get worse still. History may yet record him as the man whose European failure led to the break-up of Britain.

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