Am I dreaming – or was that really David Cameron, back at No 10?

Yes, that David Cameron. David actual Cameron. As the ex-PM roars back to the very top table of British politics, Tom Peck presumes this must make sense to someone somewhere, but wonders: who can it possibly be?

The former prime minister made a dramatic return to frontline politics as Rishi Sunak tried to reset his government before the general election expected next year (PA Wire)

Can I just check? Did that happen on everyone else’s telly, too? It wasn’t just mine, was it? On which the gates of Downing Street opened, and out from a navy people carrier popped the country’s now brand new foreign secretary David Cameron?

Even as I type these words, I am tempted to jump sideways in the air to see if my legs don’t move and I’ve actually just awoken into a dream. You know the kind. You wake up, you go downstairs, you put the kettle on, you go through the full 90-minute war to get the kids out the door, and just as you’re leaving, you go to switch off the telly and your heart just sinks, because there’s David Cameron being made foreign secretary, so you know none of it can possibly be real and in a minute you’ll wake up for real and have to do it all over again.

Except, it’s four hours later now and, as far as you’re aware, you’re still in the dream. And not just that, but you’re typing out a needlessly elaborate and lengthy introduction just to delay the fact that, quite possibly for the first time ever, you simply haven’t got a single clue what to say.

David Cameron. Yes, that David Cameron. David actual Cameron. Roaring back to the very top table of British politics, for reasons that presumably must make sense to someone somewhere, but who can it possibly be?

It can’t be Rishi Sunak, after all. That would be completely and utterly mad. It was barely four weeks ago that he was standing in a disused railway station in Manchester, announcing that the people of Britain have been failed by a “30-year status quo I am here to end”.

Slagging off past prime ministers from your own party is always bold and, usually at least, partly suicidal at the very best of times. But never before, to the best of my knowledge, has it been done as a kind of demented overture to bringing them back again.

It shows, as a matter of certainty, that while Sunak goes on about making “long-term decisions for a brighter future”, he is definitely not thinking as far ahead as four full weeks. It hints, instead, that as far as he’s concerned, when he gets up in the morning, the medium term is about lunchtime.

It’s very well documented that in early 2016, David Cameron invited the young, bright and ambitious new MP Rishi Sunak into his office and explained to him that he should back Remain in the forthcoming EU referendum, and if he didn’t, his career would be over. Sunak, famously, resisted the pressure, and Cameron and Osborne had their first sense that there was at least a chance that they had made a catastrophic miscalculation.

Sunak’s bragged about that meeting many times, and who can blame him? He was right. They were wrong. And yet here he is, seven years later, concluding that the man whose wise counsel he apparently needs is the one who gave him such terrible advice all those years ago, which he was, in the end, absolutely right to ignore. So was Cameron right, in the end? Was Sunak wrong? Who can possibly know, because absolutely none of it makes sense.

Will it be useful to have Cameron back, a household name, at least, someone to whom people will listen when he speaks, on his side in the forthcoming election campaign? For that to happen, Cameron will somehow need to escape the inescapable facts that he a) led the campaign against Brexit, which is all that any interviewer is likely to ask him about, ever; b) attacked Rishi Sunak for cancelling HS2; c) is very much in favour of all the ambitious net zero targets Sunak has also scrapped. And, oh yeah, d) was embroiled in what could have been a career-ending lobbying scandal (he denied any wrongdoing) if his career hadn’t already ended, except suddenly, now, it hasn’t.

Cameron, to his credit, does have some well-tuned political instincts. He did, after all, correctly calculate on the morning of 24 June 2016, that nobody would ever want to hear from him again. That Brexiteers hated him for being the chief Remainer, and Remainers hated him for bringing about Brexit.

The silent retreat to the shepherd’s hut was the correct course of action. That he has now decided to emerge from it again is evidence only that those well-tuned instincts have at some point left him.

Has he given any consideration to what he might do as foreign secretary? Will it be him standing up to Putin as he failed to completely do so in 2013 and 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea? Will he be standing up to China, having previously invited Xi Jinping to a state dinner at Buckingham Palace?

Will it be him who, fresh from his previous act of complete and utter failure, heads off to Europe to negotiate the UK’s exit from the European Court of Human Rights?

Would anyone even notice if he did? The main thing people will notice is just him standing there. Just being around. Just lurking next to Rishi Sunak while he tries to spend the next year badging himself as some kind of “change” candidate, while having simultaneously turned his government into a fully anthropomorphised advert for the fact that, whatever you do, however angry you get, everything just stays exactly the same.