Former British Prime Minister David Cameron has returned to the British government over eight years after he resigned from Parliament, parachuted in by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak as part of a clear leftward lurch as he reshuffles his cabinet.
David Cameron, an elected Member of Parliament for 15 years until 2016 and Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom for six of those until he resigned over his failure to win his own Brexit referendum has returned to government. His new role as Foreign Secretary, despite no longer being a democratically elected politician, has been achieved by the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak asking the King to make Cameron a ‘Life Peer’ — a non-hereditary Lord — meaning he can sit inside the House of Lords and re-assume a political role.
The remarkable move to ennoble a former Prime Minister and introduce him into government comes as PM Sunak reforms his government, apparently to make it ready to fight the general election expected late next year. It is the first time a senior government post has been filled by the Lords rather than elected Commons chamber in decades and also the first time a former Prime Minister has returned to government in a more junior role since Alec Douglas-Home became Foreign Secretary in 1970. He had been Prime Minister for one year between 1963 and 1964.
While the reshuffle may last all of Monday, so far the main changes have seen a massive departure from the right and a lurch to the Globalist centre.
LONDON, ENGLAND – NOVEMBER 12: (L-R) Former Prime Ministers David Cameron, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair and John Major attend the Remembrance Sunday ceremony at the Cenotaph on November 12, 2023 in London, England. Every year, members of the British Royal family join politicians, veterans and members of the public to remember those who have died in combat. (Photo by Henry Nicholls – WPA Pool/Getty Images)
Suella Braverman, despite her longstanding failures to govern according to her rhetoric, was nevertheless seen as a standard bearer of the Conservative right within government and was dismissed as Home Secretary this morning. She was replaced by James Cleverly, a comparatively low-key, pragmatic Brexiteer, who in turn was replaced in his Foreign Secretary role by Cameron.
David Cameron is best remembered now as being, alongside Iraq War architect Tony Blair as being one of the key figures of the middle-ground era of post-Margaret Thatcher British politics. The nominally Conservative leader entered into a coalition with the Liberal Democrats to gain power and embarked on a programme of change for Britain, including constitutional reform and ever-growing levels of immigration.
Alongside his fervently sinophile Chancellor George Osborne, Cameron presided over what was called a “golden era” of relations with China which many on the right consider to have been deeply misguided if not outright malign. The end for Cameron, however, came when he attempted to defeat a fatal blow against the right wing of his own party by calling the a Brexit referendum he believed he could not lose in 2016.
In the end, Cameron’s government was defeated in that vote and he departed from electoral politics shortly afterwards, hated by Brexiteers for his perceived dirty-tricks campaign against them in the vote, but also by Remainers for his perceived stupidity at having called the referendum in the first place.
Today’s moves represent a serious gamble for Prime Minister Sunak, as he aligns himself with the old pre-Brexit world of trenchant globalism and signals a clear break with the pro-border control wing of the party. The Conservatives — who have now been in government for 13 years — are presently considerably trailing Labour in polls, with the next general election expected at the latest in December 2024, or January 2025.
This story is developing, more follows
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