Who sleeps better at night – Barack Obama or David Cameron?

John Rentoul wonders who is more horrified as they contemplate the ruin of what they thought they had achieved

I suspect that it is Obama who is more tortured by the trashing of so much of what he stood for (Getty)

Donald Trump’s latest provocation prompts us once again to wonder what Barack Obama makes of his successor. The current president is like an art performance, designed to stoke the deepest fears of mild-mannered, right-thinking liberals for whom Obama was the Platonic ideal of a leader.

Now Trump has suggested that he’d like to postpone the election, with entirely predictable results. He doesn’t have the power to do so, even under emergency legislation, and he doesn’t have the majorities he needs in Congress to change the law, but he knows what will send elite liberals into a meltdown.

He did the same with his response to the conspiracy theory that he would refuse to accept the result of the election if Joe Biden won in November. By failing to say he would accept the result, he pressed the same big red button. Even if he could, for example, persuade Republican state legislatures to refuse to certify the results in their states, he could not prevent the electoral college from meeting, and the constitution requires a president to be inaugurated in January. If he loses the election by a clear margin, that is not going to be him.

But it is humiliating for the US to be led by someone with so little respect for democratic values that they play games with such chilling authoritarian themes. And it is especially embarrassing for Obama, who seemed to offer a new era of civility and integrity.

In a lower register, something similar happened in British politics. Boris Johnson prorogued parliament last year to no effect except to provoke Remainers who still hoped that Brexit could be stopped. Even if prorogation had lasted as long as he intended – it was cut short by the Supreme Court – it wouldn’t have allowed him to take Britain out of the EU against parliament’s wishes. But it helped dramatise the struggle for Brexit and tempted the opposition parties into giving him the election he wanted.

Which prompts us to wonder what David Cameron makes of it all, and to wonder whether he or Obama sleeps better at night as they contemplate the ruin of what they thought they had achieved.

With Cameron, we know some of what he thinks. He believes that a referendum on Europe was inevitable, because whoever succeeded him as Conservative leader would have promised to hold one. He thought it better to take it early and to fight it as a “reform-and-remainer”. We know that he feels hurt by Michael Gove’s betrayal and that he thinks Dominic Cummings is a menace, but he has never said what he truly thinks of Johnson. Does he lie awake at night thinking about how he could have stopped the man he once described as a greased piglet?

As for Obama, we know a little of how pained he was by the rise of the Tea Party movement, which seemed to draw its energy from covert or just unconscious racism in response to the idea of a black president. We know that he tried to work with moderate Republicans but found himself up against a populist irrationalism that he wasn’t equipped to handle. We suspect that he blames Hillary Clinton for running a poor campaign (just as Bill Clinton before him blamed Al Gore for failing to win a third term on his behalf).

At least Obama has healthcare to show for his time in the White House, a historically significant progressive gain that has withstood the coarsening illiberalism of what followed; Cameron has less by way of monuments.

And yet I suspect that it is Obama who is more tortured by the trashing of so much of what he stood for. To see America torn apart by the question of race after the hopes he thought his presidency embodied must cut deep.

Whereas Cameron I think is more matter-of-fact. He feels he gave it his best shot, and it didn’t work out. Brexit is about identity, but it is not about race in the way that American politics is. And Cameron was a moderate Eurosceptic: he doesn’t see Brexit as an absolute disaster – he just thinks that, on balance, staying in with the minor adjustments he negotiated would have been the better option.

Michelle Obama has just launched a podcast, on which her husband is his usual cool, reflective self, joking about how much he is loving lockdown while she is increasingly fed up with him. Now, if they could get Dave on the show to discuss regrets with Barry, that is an episode I would listen to.