Brexit: David Cameron and his crumbling house of cards

It’s often said that David Cameron is a lucky politician who has seemed to coast through politics on instinct and charm during a career that has culminated in six years as British prime minister. But on Friday, his luck seemed to run out.

After the failure of his high-stakes referendum gamble, Cameron’s legacy as the prime minister who took Britain out of the European Union — an international alliance it joined more than 40 years ago — seems to be sealed with his resignation.

Cameron promised the referendum to try and unite his Conservative party but the result means Britain becomes the first country ever to leave the bloc and raises questions about the future unity of the United Kingdom.

In announcing his intention to quit, Cameron said he had put his “head, heart and soul” into the “Remain” campaign so had little option but to go after voters rejected EU membership by 52 percent to 48 percent.

As the referendum campaign took on an increasingly anti-establishment, anti-elite tone, the polished authority of Cameron, supported by big hitters from US president Barack Obama to the International Monetary Fund, struggled to cut through.

“I think he’s actually been pretty stunned by the strength of the ‘Leave’ cause,” said Cameron biographer James Hanning. “The golden rule is, never hold a referendum unless you’re confident of winning it, and I think he thought that the moderate voices would prevail by some distance. But that’s not the way the polls are suggesting it’s going to go.”

Financial Times commentator Janan Ganesh wrote that Cameron must now “prepare to be remembered for inadvertently presiding over the end of his country’s 43-year place in the European project — and for nothing else.”

The referendum campaign has been unexpectedly bitter and divisive, and was brought to a shocked halt when Labour lawmaker Jo Cox was shot and stabbed to death in the street last week. The suspected killer gave his name in court as “death to traitors, freedom for Britain.”

Bullingdon Club to the youngest PM in 200 years

The son of a stockbroker, Cameron was educated at elite boarding school Eton and Oxford University, where he was admitted to the Bullingdon Club, a hard-drinking, socially exclusive student group.

He worked for the Conservatives as an advisor before a stint in public relations, which ended when he was elected to parliament in 2001.

Cameron rose swiftly through the ranks of the party — which was then struggling badly against prime minister Tony Blair’s Labour government — and was elected leader in 2005 at the age of 39. He tried to “detoxify” the party brand in part by avoiding discussion of the EU, which has split the Conservatives since Margaret Thatcher’s premiership in the 1980s.

At the 2010 general election, Cameron became the youngest premier for 200 years but the centre-right Conservatives did not win enough seats to govern alone and had to form a coalition with the centrist Liberal Democrats.

The coalition was dominated by spending cuts as Britain emerged from recession, while foreign policy debate was largely hijacked by Conservative wrangling over the EU. A previous risky referendum gamble paid off when Scotland voted to stay as part of Britain in 2014.

After five years in coalition, the Conservatives won a surprise clear majority in the May 2015 general election, allowing them to rule alone. The win meant that the EU referendum — first promised by Cameron in 2013 to placate his restive party, but which many in Westminster say he never believed would happen, became a reality.

Loyal lieutenants lost

Cameron spent much of the rest of 2015 lobbying other European countries for a deal to improve Britain’s relations with the EU.

Sealed in February, this allowed him to argue going into the referendum that Britain had a “special status” in the 28-country bloc, notably allowing it to limit benefit payments to EU migrants.

But the deal was derided as “thin gruel” by some Conservative MPs. The bitterest blows to Cameron came as campaigning got under way.

Some of his most loyal lieutenants including justice minister Michael Gove — godfather to one of Cameron’s children — said they would campaign for Brexit. Then Boris Johnson, who was London’s charismatic mayor at the time, sprung a surprise by also backing “Leave”.

Victoria Honeyman, a lecturer in British politics at the University of Leeds, said Cameron had seen EU battles poison the leaderships of former Tory leaders John Major and William Hague and “feared a civil war in the Conservative Party.”

She said the referendum was about “defusing that time bomb” — but Cameron has “moved from having one ticking time bomb to having another ticking time bomb.”

During the campaign, Cameron led from the front with a barrage of speeches arguing that Britain’s economy would be badly hit by Brexit.

He told voters he would forge a new deal between Britain and the EU that would make remaining an attractive prospect. At a Brussels summit in February, he won changes to welfare benefits that he said would reduce immigration and an exemption for Britain from the EU’s commitment to “ever-closer union” — a phrase that stirs images of a European super-state in some patriotic British hearts.

The concessions he gained have been dismissed as paltry by “Leave” campaigners, who say they will do little to limit immigration from other EU nations because the bloc guarantees free movement among member states. It’s a subject that resonates with many voters, who have seen hundreds of thousands of people come to Britain over the past decade from new EU members in eastern Europe. (Hundreds of thousands of Britons also live in other EU countries, a less remarked-upon fact).

However, he failed to counter the “Leave” camp’s argument that immigration from EU countries needed to be cut to reduce the strain on public services, and that this could only happen if Britain left. His old rival Johnson, who quickly morphed into a leading pro-Brexit figure, is favourite to succeed him as prime minister.

Exit looming for while

“Will I carry on as prime minister? Yes,” he told the BBC  in an interview in mid June, vowing to “construct a government that includes all of the talents of the Conservative Party.”

But even if Britain had voted to remain, Cameron’s days as leader seemed numbered. He had already announced that he would step down before the next election in 2020. A deeply divided party would have likely wanted him to leave long before that, so that a new leader can help heal the referendum’s wounds, and dissident Conservative lawmakers could have triggered a no-confidence vote to oust him.

Legacy

Hanning said 50-year-old Cameron will be worried about what the referendum means for his legacy.

Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary, University of London, said Cameron had hoped to be remembered for restoring the economy after the 2008 financial crisis and for social reforms such as legalizing same-sex marriage.

“I think gay marriage will still be an important one,” Bale said. “But unfortunately I think he’s going to be remembered in the history books as the prime minister who took us out of Europe.”

Hanning said Cameron would find that “mortifying.” But he said a vote for Brexit would overshadow Cameron’s other achievements, just as the decision to join the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 has clouded the legacy of former Prime Minister Tony Blair.

“You might say that is his Iraq,” Hanning said. “Blair had foreign affairs successes in Northern Ireland, Sierra Leone, Kosovo — and then Iraq was the manifestation of his overconfidence. I suppose people might say this is Cameron’s.”

Ultimately, though, a change of prime minister might be seen as one of the less significant consequences for a country which is now plunging into the unknown.

With inputs from agencies