Brexit isn't the part of David Cameron's legacy he should be most ashamed of

Osborne keeps being wheeled out to repeat that they "fixed the roof while the sun was shining" - but the truth is that austerity politics crippled our country and caused the referendum result

Leaving the stage: Mr Cameron says it is likely that this is his final attendance at the European Council (EPA)

What will David Cameron’s legacy look like? This was the rather less media-friendly question Jeremy Corbyn asked the Prime Minister at PMQs today, just before Cameron delivered his dame-at-the-pantomime line: “For heaven’s sake, man, go!” Much as I love it when Dave gets all quivery and porcine, it’s worth stepping away from the soundbite for a second and considering what he really will have left behind him. Because news of a shock Brexit seems to have eclipsed a lot of our precious memories of Tory Britain: DC edition.

First of all, who remembers the bedroom tax? The people forking out to live in their own homes probably do, but politicians themselves seem to have gone a bit quiet about it. And what about that drag of an issue, child poverty? That’s another minor issue Corbyn raised in the House of Commons, just before Cameron came over all theatrical. The total number of children living in poverty in the UK is now 3.9 million, and that’s not because of lazy parenting and a cycle of welfare dependence (or the “merry-go-round” of benefits dependency, in Dave’s own words): two-thirds of those children have at least one parent in work. It looked like we were doing well from 1998 to 2012, when 800,000 children were lifted out of poverty – but then, since 2010, half a million slipped back into it, and it looks like that’s at least partly because of their parents’ wage stagnation. That is a failure of epic proportions.

We shouldn’t “try and pretend last week’s vote was about the economy”, Cameron told Corbyn at PMQs – and by “the economy”, he seemed to mean “poverty caused by austerity”. But regardless of how many times George Osborne’s increasingly strained self can be wheeled out to thinly repeat the mantra “We fixed the roof while the sun was shining”, the sun didn’t shine on many of us during Cameron’s rule.

It didn’t shine on the disabled, who saw basic benefits that allowed them a dignified standard of living slashed. It didn’t shine on the young, who sat by while the housing market went from almost impossible to completely impossible to enter, while the Help to Buy scheme Cameron made so much of was dismissed by Shelter as “only helping the lucky few” since 65 per cent of homes in London, 67 per cent in the South-east, 61 per cent in southern England and 53 per cent in east England were more expensive than the cap. It didn’t shine on the vulnerable mothers who saw their Sure Start centres close, the galleries and theatres and creative spaces forced to shut by slashed arts budgets, the schools forced to turn into ideologically driven academies against the wishes of all of the teachers, or the junior doctors who spent so long protesting that the forced imposition of new contracts wasn’t safe and wasn’t fair.

Cameron is wrong when he says none of this “economy” stuff influenced the EU referendum – and I think he knows it. I think he knows that when people appeared on camera saying their jobs were gone and their schools were full and their doctors’ surgeries were bursting to breaking point and nobody in Westminster cared, they weren’t just talking about immigration. I think he knows that his austerity policies caused most of the public service breakdowns and the waiting times and declining access to training and the crisis of so few beds in mental health units and the in-work poverty, rather than a few thousand Eastern Europeans. I don’t think he’s stupid.

David Cameron’s legacy isn’t just that he played politics to try and keep Ukip at bay, promised a referendum he never thought he’d actually have to have, and ended up accidentally presiding over the UK’s historic exit from the European Union. His legacy is the father crying over the paperwork for his disabled daughter because her benefits are being taken away. His legacy is another child born to a teenage care leaver parent who ended up with no support because her local Sure Start centre closed. His legacy is the 200 children with mental health problems, some as young as 12 and most of whom were suicidal and posed no harm to others, who were held in police cells last year because there weren’t any hospital beds available. His legacy is the homeless person sleeping in a doorway or begging outside the train station, now far more common because rates of homelessness suddenly started rising again in 2010 despite steadily declining since 2003. His legacy is the household of twenty-somethings turfed out by their landlord onto the streets of London for the fourth time that year, penniless because they shelved the estate agency bills rather than their landlord and unlikely to find another decent place to live because Cameron’s Government couldn’t bring themselves to make it law that a landlord must make a property legally habitable for his tenants (a sudden end of an assured shorthold tenancy was, incidentally, the number one recorded reason for homelessness in 2014). His legacy is a queue of dead-eyed, humiliated, hard-working people queuing up outside the food bank.

Osborne and Cameron didn’t fix the roof while the sun was shining. They took a sledgehammer to the roof and let the rain come in all of us, except the wealthy pensioners they’d built a luxury granny pad for a few months earlier. Our EU membership was just a piece of the debris.