I’ve been waiting a while to see how things develop. I’ve been waiting a while to see what he’ll do, what he’ll say, how he’ll explain himself. I mean, he has to explain himself, doesn’t he? Obviously he doesn’t think so but then he is who he is. Back when he held power in his hand he was really quite accomplished at simply walking away: someone would ask a question and he would answer and then, before anyone could follow up or counter his response or suggest he was an arrogant prick, he would just walk off. Left, right, it didn’t matter, he would just waltz off, the only assumption left hanging in the air being that he was in some sense superior to everyone else there, but on that point he fell foul of one of Hewitt’s laws of existence – when people think they’re great they are never, ever as great as they think they are, often not even close to good.
And so David Cameron is tantalisingly close to being exposed. Properly. At last. Whether he will ride out the shitstorm he has brewed up is debatable, the man often appears to be Teflon coated, but I think I can speak for most of the nation when I say I hope he gets crushed, mauled, squashed and buggered for all the faith he has squandered; for all the hubris he has incubated, totally unfettered by any sense of the moral duty he must surely have known was his to uphold. Yep, I hope he gets thumped, pumped, dumped and dry humped because, you know, he really does have it coming, little pink cheeked Dave. Even if it was just for this he would deserve it, but I guess you can include anything from Bullingdon to Brexit and just work your way through his slippery coils from there (I should add that Cameron wasn’t completely useless as a PM, it’s just that, as almost ever, his demerits easily outweighed his merits – see May, Brown, Blair, Major and so on and so on and so on; Johnson can’t strictly speaking be judged until he comes out the other side).
The premise is really simple. D.C quits as Prime Minister a few days after saying he was dedicated to leading his country in the aftermath of a Brexit referendum defeat that must have tested the security gates of even his vast, shiny ego. D.C gives us a look as if to say that he is deeply sorry, but he is not sorry at all. He is not sorry that he allowed an EU referendum and he is not sorry that he wasn’t anywhere near as good or popular enough to win one either. If he is sorry for anything at all it is himself, because he has had to accept that he is a failure at a job he felt he had been so good at and he has also not been doing it long enough to earn the deeper level of respect required to be considered a true statesman. In falling short of this he doesn’t quite get the richest pickings that are available to a former PM and this is a source of much regret but, on the other hand, he may as well milk the system for as much as he can.
Just as Nick Clegg, who prior had almost convinced the world he was a half decent if ultimately quite useless human being, soiled his sheets by taking a job working for Facebook, so D.C ended up whoring himself to various bidders who were collectively incapable of seeing past his slick, Etonian veneer at the shallow, corrupt soul within. Paying someone like D.C to give a lecture on any particular subject is much the same as throwing food at a gorilla – if you give it enough of the stuff it will eventually take a shit right in front of you. As money began to roll in he even agreed (as you do) on a £800,000 deal to publish his memoirs, misleading titled “For The Record”. He also assumed interests in various companies, including Greensill Capital, a company run by the stupidly named Lex Greensill and one which offered some kind of crap financial service, the like of which is only ever dreamt up by greedy little pricks.
But it wasn’t quite that simple. Greensill had worked as an unpaid advisor (unpaid in the sense that he probably still magically earned more than you and me combined (unless you’re reading this, Jeff Bezos, in which case please give me some money) for doing a job which didn’t have a salary) for the government during D.C’s premiership; a job which gave him access to at least eleven government departments, which as you can imagine is quite a lot of departments. This opened D.C up to Lex and vice versa and they were clearly professionally spooning by the time he resigned so it made perfect sense for Greensill to take on D.C because after all he’d done loads of really hard work for H.M Government, er, for free.
It turns out that D.C’s main job at Greensill wasn’t much really, half a day here, a few hours there. A bit of lobbying. Lobby this, lobby that. Lobby the other. All above board, except for the lobbying bit. I’m not sure lobbying is strictly a crime but in the world of politics it can seem a little murky when a former PM decides to lobby on behalf of a finance company, particularly when that former PM has share option in that finance company potentially worth £60 million. That’s £60 million, in case you missed it: an even bigger number than eleven departments. Naturally D.C was keen to protect his financial interests, possibly because already being a multi-millionaire was quite a struggle, and so he first seemingly persuaded Matt Hancock to allow several NHS trusts use a Greensill Capital app, which was nice for both of them, I’m sure.
The situation started to unravel in 2020 when that silly little virus struck and D.C texted the Chancellor Rishi Sunak several times to convince him that it might be worth tinkering with the rules and allowing Greensill Capital, which was struggling to stay afloat (along with those £60 million share options, though D.C surely can’t have been worried about that), access to some big, juicy, very unsexy Covid Corporate Financing Facility loans. Sunak, fortunately, is not a complete moron and eventually declined leaving D.C at home, getting smellier by the day. Since then David Cameron hasn’t managed to come up with an explanation for his actions but since his actions are pretty transparent to all but the braindead I suppose technically he doesn’t need to explain anything.
Today Boris and the Tories have rejected calls for a MP led lobbying probe, and instinctively you just know that Boris knows that if it did happen then not only will D.C end up being probed all the way from his arsehole to his back teeth, it will also very likely open another big can of worms for him and a cabinet that seem to exist in a worm canning factory that has run out of lids. However, there is a catch, and the catch is that there is just as good a chance that through tugging and plugging and scratching backs this may all go away and another sickly abuse of power will never get the punishment it deserves. I write this to keep you in the loop, though this is hardly top level stuff and there’s nothing here you can’t find anywhere else. I merely suggest you remember that we are asked to vote for our leaders based on policies not people, but how can you trust policies if you can’t trust the people who make them? That’s all. I could have said that at the start and saved myself the bother of telling you the rest. Silly me.
G B Hewitt. 14.04.2021
On stupidity......and other causes for concern. 