‘Heir to Blair’ former prime minister David Cameron has enjoyed his stint as foreign secretary so much that he is considering running for Tory leader again after the July 4th election.
Former UKIP MEP Patrick O’Flynn, now a well-connected political journalist, claims a “well-placed Tory Left-winger” advised him that the now-Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton is surely “thinking about coming back to lead again. … He has loved being back in the thick of things and he is head and shoulders above any other figure from our wing of the party in terms of governing experience and international stature.”
Another Cameron “admirer” told O’Flynn, in no uncertain terms:
Mark my words, he’s got the taste for it again. He also has a decent following in the political media by modern Tory standards and that would be immensely useful to us.
With a good portion of semi-decent, genuinely conservative MPs set to lose their seats, polling data released in March suggested that Tory ‘moderates’ are likely to hold “the whip hand” in their parliamentary party after the election. The ultra-socially liberal Cameron—an anti-Brexit environmentalist who, as PM, was supportive of lax drug laws, appeared unfazed by the increasing sexualisation of children and did nothing to stop mass immigration—appears a natural fit to head this grouping.
Cameron last week launched an attack on Nigel Farage, despite being told not to “engage” with the Reform UK leader, accusing him of using “dog whistle” politics in an attempt to “destroy the Conservative Party.” Tim Stanley wrote a fiery response in The Daily Telegraph, insisting that “there’s a better case for claiming David Cameron destroyed the Tory party than Farage,” and that he did so by “uprooting Toryism from its constituency and philosophy. Deprived of soil and water, it lies dying.”
This point appears to fly straight over the heads of Conservative bigwigs. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt earlier this month told The Guardian (of course) that Tories shouldn’t move to the Right because “the evidence of Britain is that elections are always won from the centre ground.” Former Conservative justice secretary David Gauke has also written this week that “the Tory Right will try to shift the blame, but the looming disaster is of their making,” prompting journalist Allison Pearson to blast the “obtuseness” oh his analysis:
There are literally no (former) Conservative voters complaining their party swung too far to the Right. Feeble LibDemmery is the main complaint of the departed.
Conservatives are also trying to get the even-more-ultra liberal former PM Boris Johnson to do more party promotion in the lead-up to the election—“if ever,” said The Conservative Woman editor Kathy Gyngell, there was “a sign to demonstrate how Tories need their heads checked.”
Cameron’s alleged plan would likely see him renounce his position in the House of Lords (Parliament’s unelected upper chamber) and run for a safe Tory seat in the House of Commons later this year. One party source said this wasn’t going to happen; that Cameron “closed the door on his leadership eight years ago.” But Isabel Oakeshott—Cameron biographer and partner of Reform chairman Richard Tice noted that “if David Cameron becomes an MP again in hopes of leading what remains of the broken Tories, it would play PERFECTLY into Reform hands. Here’s hoping this rumour is true.”
