What Are They Thinking With David Cameron’s Return? The Answer Is Grim.

David Cameron won the first general election in Britain that I was old enough to vote in, at 18, in 2010. His tenure as prime minister has darkly stalked the nation since. He was responsible for the austerity measures that decimated public services, leading to a surge in child poverty and food-bank use. He began the process of tanking the National Health Service by underfunding it. He stood down in 2016 after the Brexit referendum result came in, the referendum he himself called to put an end to the debate on European Union membership and the result of which, as everyone has surely heard by now, sucks real bad.

He also once forgot his daughter in a pub, but honestly, this is the only thing he’s ever done that made me think “all right, fair enough, that’s a human thing to do.” In November 2018, rumors flew that Cameron was considering a return to front-line politics on account of being “bored shitless,” but that never happened. When he released an attempt at image rehabilitation in the form of a self-serving memoir in 2019, the reception was not warm. (A New York Times headline from the time: “David Cameron Is Sorry. Really, Really Sorry.”) Since then, he’s been more or less out of sight, out of mind.

So to log onto my computer first thing on a Monday morning and discover that David Cameron was the new foreign secretary of the U.K. was a jump scare. It was a whiplash moment, anyway. The appointment came immediately after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak sacked another secretary, Suella Braverman, a rabidly right-wing politician who described a scheme to send asylum-seekers in Britain to Rwanda as her “dream” (that plan was finally declared unlawful by our Supreme Court on Wednesday) and called homelessness a “lifestyle choice” as recently as last week.* She was fired after she criticized the police for being too lenient toward protesters calling for a cease-fire in Gaza. And now in her stead, suddenly, was Cameron, a ghoul of the Tory party’s recent past, come back to haunt us.

What’s Cameron been up to since he retired from politics? He’s been doing charity work and wrote that quite blah memoir in what he called a “shepherd’s hut” he put in his garden. Then he took a dodgy advisory role at a financial services company, which paid him a salary of £1 million to lobby senior ministers for emergency COVID loans. One of our news presenters, Kay Burley, also declared that he’s spent the past seven years gaining weight, in one of the most needless drive-bys I can recall and which promptly led to national acrimony online.

It’s hard to know how Cameron’s appointment will play out politically, but it’s certainly a move designed to help win the Tories a general election. Sunak will have to call one within the next year or so, and recent polling suggests his approval rating is at a record low following a disastrous party conference last month. The optics of appointing Cameron aren’t great: Sunak looked around at his entire crop of MPs and thought, “No, let’s get one of the old guys back instead.” In fact, Cameron shouldn’t have been eligible for the position at all. Special measures had to be taken, with Sunak giving Cameron a House of Lords seat to make it legal. This appointment has been an unpleasant reminder that our quote-unquote “democratic government” has a loophole whereby if a prime minister decides to give a peerage to someone, they don’t even have to be a member of Parliament, don’t have to be elected by anybody, in order to hold a Cabinet position. Bringing Cameron back also makes a mockery of Sunak’s whole shtick thus far, which has been to offer change from the preceding 13 years of Tory rule, almost half of which took place under, well, David Cameron.

So why take a risk on Cameron? Cameron was the one who managed to take government back for the Tories after 13 years of Labour leadership. He stayed at the helm for a good while, too, six years as prime minister. The U.K. has had four Tory prime ministers in the seven years since: Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Sunak. Truss (she of the lettuce) was in power just 50 days. The party has felt unstable, and what Sunak wants to convey more than anything ahead of a general election is stability. Who better to imply that than Cameron, someone who built his reputation on the notion of being sensible and reliable, rather than dog-whistling hard-right talking points, like Suella Braverman? (Never mind all that Brexit stuff.) It’s already working on some voters, for sure: Someone uttered the words “Daddy’s home” in response to Cameron’s appointment, and if I had to read those two words, so do you.

Then again, a large section of the Tory support base is still furious about the Brexit referendum and haven’t forgotten who orchestrated it. Cameron’s grim return says a lot about the state of politics in this country, not least because he very well could pull the ship back around for the Conservatives as the clock ticks down to an election. I hope not. But I have no doubt he will find a way to cast himself out of public once again.