David Cameron, didn’t you risk an outcome you didn’t believe in to help your political career too?

The former prime minister has cemented his place, alongside Boris Johnson, on the honours board of that definitively English breed of politicians with a lack of curiosity about lives alien to their own

You wouldn’t like him when he’s angry. You probably wouldn’t like David Cameron when he’s chillaxed, or in any emotional state whatever. The working title of any shepherd’s hut-based sitcom would be Everybody Hates Dave.

Arch Remainers, no-dealers, everyone in between… not a soul has had a kind word or thought for him in three years. Despising Cameron for the capital crime of countrycide by gross negligence is just about the last thing left that unites us. Even those who wanted their country maimed, and ought to be grateful to him for the referendum, disdain the poor sod.

But an angry Cameron is especially hard to like, and sullen rage radiates from the section of his memoir concerning certain former colleagues, as serialised in the Sunday Times.

The fury comes with the inevitable icing of self-pity. In fairness, he tries to disguise it. But there, as elsewhere, he is a failure. What was done to him was treachery, as an earlier Tory PM done in by Europe didn’t quite put it, with flecks of foam on its face.

His poison pen portraits of the traitors are barely worth a first glance. Boris Johnson didn’t believe in Brexit, he reminds the four people in Britain who forget the two Telegraph columns. He spearheaded the Leave campaign, Cameron explains to the terminally hard of comprehending, solely to cement his status as the darling of his party.

Johnson “rode the [£350m per week for the NHS] bus round the country, he left the truth at home,” writes Cameron. All right, soft lad, tell us something we don’t know.

Something we didn’t know, and therefore more damaging on the surface, is that during the campaign for the first one, Johnson privately floated a second referendum.

A nanometre beneath the surface, however, lies the knowledge that Johnson’s endless capacity for lies, like Trump’s, is factored into the share price. The revelation of a few more from a discredited political ghost will hardly cause a burst of panic selling now.

It is for his one-time close personal friend Michael Gove, “a foam-flecked Faragist” as he winsomely alliterates, that Cameron reserves the particularly acute anger we project away from ourselves, for being so stupid, and on to those we have massively misjudged.

Cameron knew Johnson for an amoral, narcissistic force of nature from Bullingdon days, and hints at a certain residual fondness for the old rascal. But discovering Gove’s defining trait came as a visceral shock.

In another context (one not involving the ruination of a country), you could warm to Cameron for that. To spend an hour in Gove’s company, let alone many years, without pegging him for a serpentine schemer – a creature out of time, better suited to skulking around the medieval Vatican in a purple nightie plotting to hasten the Holy Father’s ascension to God’s right hand – suggests an endearingly child-like simplicity of mind.

However staggering that show of naivety, another is more so. Before the referendum campaign, Cameron writes, he hoped for a 70-30 remain majority.

Casually mentioned in blithe ignorance of its significance, that statistic tells the tale of Cameron’s downfall in four digits.

It speaks to the smugness of someone so cocooned in his own world, so uninterested in other worlds, that the seething resentment of the ignored and dispossessed entirely escaped him.

George Osborne and others cautioned him about the extreme danger of a referendum. He ignored the warnings in complacent expectation of a landslide victory that could only have existed misrouted in utopian fantasy fiction.

Cameron outlines seven mistakes he made during the campaign, which is nice, including the refusal to go negative on Johnson and Gove. But he denies it was a mistake to call the referendum in the first place. It’s Tony Blair graciously acknowledging errors in the aftermath of Iraq, but doughtily defending the war itself, all over again.

Inadequate though he is as an apologist, as an avenger he is worse. He seeks to settle scores by shaming those – Priti Patel and Dominic Cummings along with Johnson and Gove – with no capacity to feel shame. What he may regard as explosive revelations are needless confirmations of what most sentient beings had sussed about this vandalous cabal long before he did.

You may not like him when he’s angry, but Cameron cuts an even less convincing Hulk impersonator than the current PM, with his faux-deranged, cynical gibberish about busting free of the Brexit shackles.

He cements his place, alongside Johnson, on the honours board devoted to that definitively English breed of politicians whose judgment is in direct inverse proportion to their intellect. He joins the line, stretching back to Enoch Powell and beyond, of clever fools.

Cameron’s bespoke foolishness stems from the classic Sloane’s lack of curiosity about lives alien to his own. The lives, for example, of those without his resources to mitigate the practical difficulties of caring for a child like Ivan; the victims he and his government stripped of dignity and comfort to gratify the vindictiveness of feral newspapers.

Any man with his experience who cannot empathise with the parents of the grievously disabled can empathise with nobody. So it was that by 2016, having spent six years punishing the poor for the sins of the avaricious rich, he hadn’t a clue about the genuinely frightening rage that had built in forgotten corners of the country.

When it found expression in a protest vote much less against Brussels than the city-state of London, he was as startled by that as by his epiphany about Gove. If he expects an ounce of sympathy from this non-apologia apologia of a memoir, he has learned nothing since.