The Cameron Years review: The former PM frets about Brexit every day

The first of this two-part documentary traces Cameron’s fall from grace when he made the decision to hold 2016’s Brexit referendum that saw the UK plunged into turmoil

'The Cameron Years' on BBC1 assesses David Cameron's time as prime minister (BBC)

David Cameron knows his reputation can never be rehabilitated. Remainers will never forgive him for calling the EU referendum of 2016; Leavers will give him no credit for it because he campaigned to stay in. He is destined to be eternally friendless. He certainly comes across as very lonely and despondent in The Cameron Years (BBC1).

For a man who was once the “heir to Blair” – the popular, young, personable fresh face of the modern, moderate, green, liberal, progressive, united Tories, and the first leader to deliver them a majority in parliament since 1992 – the fall from grace is visibly hard to bear.

At least the BBC organised a nicely produced film to coincide with the release of his memoir For the Record. The usual momentous “doom approaching” type soundtracks were melded with well-chosen archive and succinct testaments from those involved. The first of this two-part episode telling Cameron’s tale gave the events of 2015 and 2016 a sense of momentum and drama that belied the tedious reality of EU membership renegotiation and the subsequent pretty dull referendum campaign, regarded as a foregone conclusion for Remain. (“Leave will be crushed like a toad under the harrow” in Boris Johnson’s private prediction to Cameron at the time).

The dreamy fade-out sequences also worked well with the traditional talking heads, and the captioning of key dates and events helped us retrace the early, (comparatively) calm phases of the never-ending Brexit crisis.

Without exception, everyone appearing (ie except Cameron) attests that holding the referendum was a mistake and that they warned Cameron as much at the time: George Osborne, Iain Duncan Smith, Nick Clegg, Michael Heseltine, even Michael Gove. For good measure, Cameron’s closest ally, Osborne, blithely remarks that: “David Cameron was one of a number of British prime ministers who had fed this idea that Brussels was to blame and that the public had to have a say.” You’d think that Osborne had been on a gap year in Vietnam rather than next door in No 11 when all this was going on.

Heseltine is more to the point. He blames Osborne’s austerity for triggering all the miserable Brexity feelings out there, an argument Cameron gets as close as he can do to accepting: “It was part of the backdrop, but not the defining feature.” Well, of course not.

In amongst all the grandees, the secretaries of state, special advisers and strategists, the programme-makers did well to insert early on that by now well-worn clip of Danny Dyer offering his verdict on the Cameron years. In its way it’s as elegant and eloquent as anything that might be coined by, say, Peter Hennessy, Niall Ferguson or Philip Ziegler.

“So what’s happened to that twat David Cameron who called it on. Let’s be fair ... How comes he can scuttle off? He called all this on. Yeah? Called it on. Where is he? He’s in Europe, in Nice, with his trotters up, yeah? Where is the geezer?”

And then a nice visual joke, we mix through to meet geezer Cameron fixing his microphone as he embarks on his mostly frank account of the most calamitous decision ever made in postwar British politics, even more far-reaching than Eden’s Suez debacle of 1956, or Blair’s invasion of Iraq in 2003.

It’s fascinating to study Cameron after all this time. Open-necked shirt, Cotswolds-casual style, he retains that weird, smooth, slightly Botoxed-looking, semi-chubby cheeked face that the cartoonists found so easy to capture. He sounds the same – posh and earnest but bloodless. At 52, his hair shows no greying from worry, even though he professes to “brood” a lot, and frets about Brexit every day. His demeanour seems to betray an internal battle between an entitled Etonian arrogance and post-epochal disaster humility. This is Flashman trying to morph into Dobby the house elf. He uses the word “regret” a lot but never shows remorse.

Certainly, he blames himself: “I will go to my grave wondering whether there is more that we could have done.” He blames himself for losing the vote; for not getting more out of the Europeans in his talks; for misjudging the virulence of the “latent Leave gene” in his party; for his own 100,000 immigration target. Yet he also blames, with some reason, the Europeans for not helping him more (plus ca change…).

He blames Boris Johnson for pursuing naked personal advantage and never actually believing in Brexit (no argument there); and Gove for breaking a promise not to play a big role in the Leave campaign. He blames Priti Patel, and the rest of them, for slagging off their own government. Fair enough.

Where Cameron fails to convince is his refrain that although the consequences of his decision were dreadful and regrettable, the decision itself was still the right thing to do. Like Tony Blair and Iraq, or Nick Clegg and tuition fees, this is pure sophistry. We elect and pay our leaders to make the right decisions, which can only be judged on their actual consequences. “Right at the time” is a defence that only journalists can deploy, and even then only self-mockingly.

What Cameron is too proud to admit is that if he hadn’t caved into the clamour in his own party for a referendum – which was real, if inexplicably strong – they’d have sacked him and found somebody else who would give them their referendum. His MPs were spooked by Nigel Farage and driven by their devotion to Thatcherism. In that sense, maybe, the referendum was quite inevitable, but he didn’t have to be the one who did it.

There were a couple of glaring absences. Johnson, for obvious reasons, though we saw and heard a lot of him in the clips. But of Dominic Cummings, there was not a glimpse anywhere, despite his pivotal role in the Leave campaign and, reading between the lines, messing with Gove’s head. Maybe Cameron is so scarred by him that he just refused to utter the name of the man he called “a career psychopath”, and who is currently dismantling the rest of Cameron’s legacy. No wonder David’s distraught.

‘The Cameron Years’ is on BBC1 tonight at 9pm