Cameron has lost his job – his Teflon cockiness has finally worn off [View all]

[malaise]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/24/david-cameron-resign-teflon-cockiness
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Financial chaos, economic crisis, the likely breakaway of Scotland and possibly Northern Ireland: quite a morning’s work for the Bullingdon Club.

Remember as the pound plunges and the markets slide that this entire referendum was called by David Cameron to fend off Nigel Farage and his own Tory ultras. There was no public outcry for a ballot – but for the sake of a bit of internal party management, he called one anyway. He gambled Britain and Europe’s future to shore up his own position. With all the confidence of a member of the Etonian officer class, he thought he’d win. Instead he has bungled so badly that the fallout will drag on for years, disrupting tens of millions of lives across Europe.

All this from a man who sauntered into the job of prime minister “because I thought I’d be good at it”. He rarely showed any reason for such self-confidence. His plans to modernise the Conservative party crumbled upon first touch with the banking crisis, which forced him and Osborne to reheat the Thatcherite economics they’d imbibed as students. The “big society” turned almost immediately back into the Small State. At No 10, he launched an austerity drive that was meant to be over within five years, but is now scheduled to go on for double that. Other prime ministers handed power for a long stretch come up with ideas, policies, a style of governing that defines them: Thatcherism, Blairism. What was Cameronism, apart from a hectoring manner at PMQs and an inability to keep on top of detail?

You’ll be reminded endlessly over the next few days how tight this referendum was – that half the country didn’t vote for this. Quite right – and also serious evidence of the weakness of the PM. At the last referendum over Britain’s future in Europe, in 1975, Harold Wilson secured a whopping majority. Never a man to ask a question of whose answer he wasn’t absolutely certain, he got a landslide. But when Cameron was handed the full resources of the British state to run this campaign, he still couldn’t count on anything more than a small lead in the polls. A born member of the governing class, he simply wasn’t able to govern.