David Cameron, Boris Johnson and the death of the English ruling class

Their failure opened the door to the hard right

An oil painting of Bullingdon Club members, including Boris Johnson and David Cameron (front row, centre). Photograph: Painting and photograph: Rona

A few days ago, the Sky news presenter Kay Burley issued a gushing and gruesome appreciation of (Lord) David Cameron. 

Leave aside for a moment that broadcasters are obliged by law to display due impartiality. Forget, too, and forgive my language, that Burley is meant to be a bloody journalist, not some forelock tugging flunkey, and that the taboos of British journalism used to encourage us to display a little self-respect by not abasing ourselves before the powerful. 

We can leave denunciations of the corruptions of courtier journalism for another day.

Instead, consider what Burley’s servility tells us about how snobbery and deference powered the UK’s decline.

By any standards, including, crucially, his own, David Cameron was a disastrous prime minister.

In 2016, he called a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU. He listened to the entitled inner voice that assured him he would win at a canter, and proceeded to lose the referendum and his job, and to send the UK into a rolling crisis from which it has never really recovered.

But Cameron went to Eton and Oxford, and was properly posh. He was descended from a mistress of William IV, which for overseas readers is only one step behind being descended from William IV’s lawfully wedded wife, if you can imagine such grandeur in a lineage.

Burley allowed Cameron’s shopworn charm to gild over his terrible premiership. Writing as if she worked for Mills & Boon rather than Sky News, she described how:

“Striding determinedly towards me, hand outstretched to offer a firm, eye-contact handshake, Lord Cameron cuts a powerful image as he arrives for our interview.”

Hers was not a new infatuation. Burley confessed to having been beguiled by Cameron for decades.

“I first met him as a friendly, fresh-faced MP when he was put forward by the government in the 2005 election campaign,” she continued. “He was calm, friendly and self-assured. When he left, I turned to the cameraman and said I bet you £20 he’s a future PM. A warm smile spread across Lord Cameron’s face as I shared the recollection with him.”

I am sure it did. Yet, and here is where deference shows its intelligence-obliterating power, despite the catastrophic failure of his government, Burley still thinks of Cameron as a great man who is “unquestionably a safe pair of hands in the unpredictable world of politics”.

One of the many virtues of John Crace’s Westminster satire Taking the Lead is that he understands the centrality of Cameron’s upper-class dilettantism to the British crisis.

If you don’t know the work of the Guardian’s political sketch writer you are missing a treat. To catch up, you can listen to my Lowdown podcast interview with Crace here on Apple.

And on Spotify

 

And on Amazon here and then every other conceivable podcast host here

The difference between Crace and Burley is that courtier journalists do not understand their country, or how it is changing.

The question about Cameron we should be asking today is whether the calamity he set in motion has destroyed the chances of his old ruling class ever returning to power. The Brexit he brought upon us by mistake has propelled the growth of a new radical right, which makes no effort to cover its brutality, with a veneer of civilised manners.

It was not always thus. Cameron’s success in the 2010s showed that, uniquely in Europe, the old aristocracy still mattered. No one could deny its hold on the English imagination – I say “English” because a majority of the Scots, Welsh and Irish were never captured.

The monarchy, the museum culture we export to the world from Upstairs Downstairs to Downton Abbey, the country house tours flogged by the tourist boards and National Trust, all speak of a country which has maintained its ruling class for centuries. 

Despite all the democratic advances, it remains the case that an upper-class accent, a Savile Row suit and an insouciant air can still take you to places you would never reach on merit alone.

Meanwhile, the image of the gentleman, who might be wealthy, but has a sense of noblesse oblige, good manners and a self-deprecating air, retains a huge appeal even to leftists who like to think themselves immune. 

Britain did not have a revolution in the late 18th century. Napoleon did not invade in the early 19th. The peasants and small farmers never got hold of the land. To this day half of England is owned by less than 1% of its population. 

You might think that the persistence of the old order should lead the British to hate the aristocracy and the monarchy. And of course some do. But British exceptionalism also had its benign side. Almost alone in Europe, the UK did not fall to the Nazis.  We never saw elements within its ruling class and monarchy collaborating with Hitler. On the contrary, and with the exceptions of Oswald Mosley, Edward VIII and a handful of others, they defended their country.

The aristocratic style played well into the 2010s until Cameron killed it. 

His studied insouciance, and determination not to take the world too seriously – for why should you when the world owes you a living? – was a disaster for Britain.

John Crace captures the unforgivable laziness with which Cameron’s Downing Street treated the referendum: