What was the remarkable failure of David Cameron? That he allows Britains to vote on remaining in the EU.
From the elites perpsective, this was his failure. He allowed a vote. How horrible!
But his political obituaries have not been so cuddly. “This week, he said farewell with characteristic good grace: one never doubted his fluency or essential decency,” Jason Cowley, editor of the New Statesman, wrote of Cameron. “What you doubted was his conviction, his soul, his spirit.”
“His referendum campaign, for all its flashes of skill and conviction, was too little, too late. The whole exercise was a spectacularly foolhardy act of overreach,” wrote the Economist. “The unanticipated outcome will be a Britain poorer, more isolated, less influential and more divided.”
“Mr Cameron has never shaken off the suspicion of being a man who wanted to be prime minister for the sake of holding the highest office and never had a vision for the country,” wrote James Blitz of the Financial Times. “As time passes, some may reflect on some of the good things that were achieved under his premiership. But those achievements are likely to be dwarfed by the giant miscalculation that he made over Britain’s place in Europe.”
It’s hard to overstate how seismic Britain’s planned rupture with Europe is: It signals the untangling of decades of European integration, the rejection of the principles of the post-Cold War liberal order, and now threatens the integrity of the United Kingdom itself, with Scottish nationalists eager to remain in the E.U. while casting off the yoke of Westminster.
“He’ll go down in history as the man who gambled everything on a referendum and lost, effectively blowing half a century of economic and diplomatic effort on the part of his predecessors,” Timothy Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary, University of London, told USA Today.
“Cameron leaves Downing Street with few admirers, a country in crisis, the central aims of his premiership in rubble,” concludes Guardian columnist Owen Jones. “It is nearly enough to make you pity him – but, given how grave the situation facing our country is, not quite. His premiership is a tragedy for which we will all pay.”
