News from Nowhere: Out of Office
David Cameron’s conduct has revealed to the nation and to the world the material interests which now underpin British politics.
David Cameron, who served in Downing Street between 2010 and 2016, was this month reported having earned about $10 million from his involvement with Greensill Capital, a now-defunct financial corporation, on whose behalf Mr. Cameron is said to have lobbied senior members of the government (including the Chancellor of the Exchequer) for financial support, and which he is alleged to have promoted as an investment opportunity. He has also this month been reported to have encouraged the then Secretary of State for Health to speak at a conference hosted by another company he was working for – shortly before that company was awarded a government contract worth £123 million.
Of course, life isn’t all roses and Rolls Royces for former Prime Ministers. Their peculiar plight has been satirized with extraordinarily prescient topical currency by the new BBC situation comedy Party’s Over, whose first series concluded last week: the story of a recently departed incumbent of the nation’s highest office, an avaricious narcissist ditched by the voters and by his own party as a result of his utter incompetence, lacking any talents that he might put to good use, desperately missing the luxuries and kudos that accompany political power, unprincipled and irredeemably materialistic, both grasping and grasping at straws. The show was based upon the premise that career politicians tend to prosper only through their ambition, confidence and connections, rather than on the basis of any natural ability or special expertise; and that those who seek political power may therefore be those least deserving of it. So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to discover that, when denied their drug of choice, these power junkies might sometimes spin far away from the expectations of conduct proper to the positions they have lost.
The British have nevertheless been scandalized by Mr. Cameron’s apparent attempts to profit from his years in Downing Street. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, they expect their erstwhile leaders to rise statesmanlike above such sordid financial pursuits. It’s true, however, that Britain’s surviving former Prime Ministers have pursued very different paths after their times in government.
At the age of 78, the UK’s oldest living ex-premier, John Major has continued to support the Northern Ireland peace process, an initiative whose progress he had vigorously sponsored in government and which reached fruition shortly after his term in Downing Street ended in 1997. He has also vocally opposed the jingoistic leadership of his fellow Conservative Boris Johnson, has engaged in work for numerous charities, and has continued to indulge his love of cricket, while taking work with a range of multinational financial institutions including Credit Suisse, the Carlyle Group, Global Infrastructure Partners and the National Bank of Kuwait.
When he left Downing Street in 2007 after a decade in power, Major’s successor Tony Blair became an envoy for peace in the Middle East. The irony of one of the architects of the Iraq War assuming this role was not lost on most of the rest of the world. He now runs the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, which serves his dual interests in international policies based on unsolicited interventionism and in seeing his own name in shiny print. Mr. Blair is also reported to have received very healthy remunerations from his public speaking engagements, for which he is said to be able to command fees that exceed £250 per second. The politician who once attempted to capture ‘hearts and minds’ in his crusade to save a nation ‘45 minutes from attack’ by ‘weapons of mass destruction’ this month described the withdrawal of NATO forces from Afghanistan as being motivated by an ‘imbecilic political slogan’ – a subject on which he might be credited with some expertise.
Blair’s own successor (and his former Chancellor) Gordon Brown has, since leaving office in 2010, become an unpaid adviser to the World Economic Forum and a United Nations Special Envoy on Global Education, and has continued his life-long campaign to alleviate poverty both within the UK and across the world. The payments for his work advising an investment management company are donated to charitable causes. These activities appear at least consistent with the agenda he pursued for much of his short-lived but impactful premiership, during which he spearheaded a transnational neo-Keynesian response to the global financial crisis of 2007-08 by urging economic stimuli through state investments in industrial and social infrastructures, and in which he also led the way for developed economies to cancel the debts owed to them by developing nations. In recent weeks, he has pushed to mobilize western governments to release surplus Covid-19 vaccines to those parts of the planet most in need of them.
Meanwhile, Theresa May, the latest addition to Britain’s gallery of past leaders, has remained in parliament to act as a thorn in the side of her duplicitous successor, her former Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, who replaced her in July 2019.
They’ve made remarkably varied career choices since quitting Downing Street, but what none of these people has done has been quite so overtly, directly and visibly to exploit their governmental contacts for personal gain as David Cameron seems to have tried. In particular, they don’t appear to have badgered former colleagues still in office to ask them for favours on behalf of companies they’re working for. The British people and the British media don’t expect such shamelessly self-serving and openly mercenary behaviour from their elder states people. It’s not just that it might smell faintly of cronyism or even corruption. It’s simply that it’s in the poorest of taste, and that’s one of the greatest sins a retired politician can commit. It undermines the honour and dignity of the loftiest office in the land, and thereby cheapens the country’s perception of itself and its international profile, very publicly denting its high-minded pride in what it likes to imagine to be its own reputation for honesty, decency and fair play, a reputation on which it once justified an empire and which it still deploys to claim its place on the global stage.
These venal practices aren’t supposed to be the British way. The people of the UK have always considered themselves above such things. Profiteering is terribly unseemly, and should always take place behind closed doors, after dark and preferably overseas. It’s a matter not so much of social class as of social classiness: the tradition that true gentlemen don’t discuss money in polite society, and, according to Oscar Wilde, never have any anyway. By contrast, David Cameron’s conduct has revealed to the nation and to the world the material interests which now underpin British politics. These revelations have begun to engender a sense of public outrage and disgrace which threatens something fundamental at the heart of the country’s identity. This kind of thing just isn’t British. It offends our patrician sensibilities, our paternalistic creed of sportsmanship, the clichéd but heroic spirit that once made the nation stand up and be counted, and play up and play the game. Or, as Sir John Major might say, it’s just not cricket.
Six years ago, a businessman hostile to David Cameron declared in the press that he (Mr. Cameron) had once, while at university, engaged in a feat of erotic congress with the severed head of a pig. Whatever one’s religious or moral affiliations, this was clearly an unclean act. Although this accusation was almost certainly untrue, it nevertheless caught the public imagination because it aligned surprisingly closely with the general impression of Cameron as a smug and pampered elitist, an upper-class oddball cut off from the ways of ordinary folk. This summer’s revelations have adhered to a similar perspective, drawing to the surface of public consciousness a lingering set of unsavoury suspicions waiting to be reborn.
Yet this isn’t merely an out-of-date narrative about a one-time politician. Cameron’s opportunistic and acquisitive activities since leaving office have assumed the complicity of former colleagues and fellow Conservatives still serving in government. They have also recalled the long-standing relationship between Mr. Cameron and the current Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and the similarities of their backgrounds: they attended the same school and the same university, where they were both members of the same private club. Mr. Johnson may have reached his current position on the tide of his own rabble-rousing calls to disrupt the UK establishment, but his old friend David Cameron’s recent actions have reminded the British people of the established privilege and affluence from which both men rose to power. They expose arrogance and cynicism at the top of politics which appear to have endured for much of the last decade and which may continue to damage trust in the institutions of power for many years ahead.
It has repeatedly been claimed by his dwindling band of supporters that Mr. Cameron hasn’t broken any rules or laws. Yet his conduct might still call into question his party’s core philosophies of libertarianism and commercial deregulation. When freed from the interventions of the state, they suppose, that markets, corporations and capital itself will somehow resolve and rebalance social and economic problems. But their former leader’s business activities, unfettered by formal regulations, seem to have demonstrated that, in moral terms at least, money doesn’t always steer us down the path of integrity and justice.
Theirs is, after all, a government whose attitudes increasingly seem to be epitomised by the air of entitlement and complacency of a Foreign Secretary who refused this month to interrupt his summer holiday at a luxury Cretan hotel which billed itself as a ‘sparkling boutique resort for
the privileged’ – even as the Taliban advanced upon Kabul.
Boris Johnson himself has been accused of breaching the codes and protocols of his office on several occasions – from his late registrations of personal financial interests, his use of government communications facilities to launch political diatribes, an offer to ‘fix’ a wealthy benefactor's tax concerns and the ambiguities surrounding the funding of the extravagant refurbishment of his official residence, through to claims last week that he used public monies to cover the costs of his travel to participate in a by-election campaign.
Wrapped in their cocoons of wealth, influence and patronage, too many of their exclusive set appear to have lost touch with the realities of the outside world and with the lived experience and expectations of their electorate. And, as Donald Trump’s final weeks in office demonstrated, leaders who consider themselves above the law, above common decency and above the institutions of democracy can become very dangerous indeed.