Out – his only epitaph

IT was early December 2005, and the rain was lashing down as a small Ford, wipers flashing back and forth across the windscreen, went dashing along the A66 from Middlesbrough to Darlington.

Crammed into the front seat, his scrunched knees picking at his ears, was David Cameron, whizzing about the country as the odds on him becoming Conservative leader fell. He turned awkwardly to face his back seat inquisitor, his forehead smooth, shiny and slappable, and so he missed the spray clearing from the screen to reveal a brief glimpse of the Sedgefield seat that had elected Tony Blair since 1983.

But he didn’t deny describing himself as “the heir to Blair”, explaining that just as Mr Blair had reshaped and modernised the Labour Party for the post-Thatcher world, so he wished to reshape and modernise the Conservative Party so it was part of the post-Blair world.

They were many similarities between Mr Cameron on the verge of the party leadership in 2005 and Mr Blair when he had been on the verge of his party leadership a decade earlier. They were both big, impressive young men who filled a room – and certainly a car – with the force of their personality, and they had a bold certainty about them that was vigorously driving them onwards and upwards.

Today, on the last day of Mr Cameron’s leadership, there is another huge similarity between the two men: for all that they achieved in the intervening years, for all that they changed the country in their time in office, both will be remembered for one profound decision: Mr Blair deliberately took us to war in Iraq; Mr Cameron accidentally pulled us out of Europe.

Just like pre-1997 Blair, the young Cameron was the fresh-faced epitome of newness and hope: he was all about hugging hoodies, as a way of curing society’s ills, and embracing huskies, as a way of closing the hole in the ozone layer. Yet all that fell apart with the 2007-08 financial crash, and when the country ejected Gordon Brown from Downing Street in 2010, it forced Mr Cameron into a coalition partnership with the Liberal Democrats, led by Nick Clegg.

The really important partnership, though, was between Mr Cameron and George Osborne, his Chancellor, as they imposed a new age of austerity and cutbacks. They clearly had to tackle the country’s record deficit, but it is hard not to feel that their crackdown on council spending and welfare claimants has had a disproportionate effect on poorer places, like the North-East. Certainly towns like Darlington are now very different, and with their loss of support for underprivileged people and the downgrade of their cultural facilities, it can’t be said that they are better places.

Yet, despite expectations and just when the country needed it, the Cameron/Clegg coalition provided stability. Mr Cameron’s position was strong enough to crush Lib Dem desires to reform the voting system, and powerful enough to impose new structures of local government. With Hitachi’s train-building factory at Aycliffe at its core, the “northern powerhouse” evolved, and if curious concepts like the Tees Valley and the rest of the North-East do end up with directly elected mayors, Mr Cameron will have brought in a long-lasting decentralisation.

But, perhaps providentially, Mr Cameron’s position was not commanding enough to persuade Parliament to intervene militarily in Syria, and he just escaped breaking up the United Kingdom when the Scots voted against independence by 55 per cent to 45.

Just as Mr Blair was never whole-heartedly embraced by his own party, so Mr Cameron’s traditional backbenchers grew increasingly restless – some were on the verge of defecting to the growing Ukip.

When he first became party leader, Mr Cameron had promised to stop his party “banging on about Europe”, and even in that crammed car in 2005, he had accepted that Britain’s place was within the EU. He had said: “I want to fight for a Europe that is more about nation states trading and co-operating with each other, one that’s not about ever closer union, and as more countries come into the EU, it will become more like the one we want.”

Despite this, in 2013, he offered a hostage to fortune: he promised to renegotiate British membership and then hold an in/out referendum during the first half of the next parliament.

Many in Westminster now suspect that this pledge was designed to be given up when the country voted for a hung parliament in the 2015 General Election. Mr Cameron would have been forced back into bed with the pro-European Lib Dems who would have killed the referendum.

But the pledge worked too well. It cooked Ukip’s goose and Mr Cameron was surprisingly returned to Downing Street with a slender majority of 12.

After this “sweetest victory”, he had to press on with the referendum. Perhaps just as Mr Blair was emboldened by his previous successful military escapades so Mr Cameron was boosted by his previous success in the Scottish referendum, and after the renegotiation he advised the British to vote to remain a part of the EU.

When they voted against him, he could not possibly remain as a leader. For all the dignity of his departure, he staked his party’s internal differences against what he believed to be his country’s best interests, and he lost. It was a self-inflicted career-ender which has ushered in the most profound change in Britain since the war – perhaps even breaking up the UK – which will take years to resolve. History cannot remember him for anything else.