I’m sorry because I failed: An interview with David Cameron

‘How have you been?’ David Cameron asks, bounding up to meet me. Fine, I say, then make the mistake of asking him the same question. His face drops. ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Well. So-so.’ Watching the political news, he says, has been getting him down (in a way it didn’t when he was in office) and if you’ve picked up a newspaper in recent days, you’ll know why. His memoir, For the Record, is out and the extracts make it sound like a 700-page apology note to the nation. He’s sorry for the referendum result. Sorry for what came after. And above all, sorry for letting villains like Boris Johnson and Michael Gove get away with it.

Standing in his jogging kit, fresh from his morning run, the former prime minister still looks a bit deflated. His Big Sorry, he says, is a prerequisite for being heard on anything else. ‘In my position, you can’t really complain and say: forget about the referendum and read the rest of the book,’ he says. ‘I do want to win domestic arguments. But I can’t do that unless I address the elephant in the room, which is what has happened since the referendum.’ An almighty mess, and one which he admits to having had a pretty big part in creating.

We meet in his new office, which bears a striking resemblance to his old one: a Georgian townhouse with an imposing black door and a grand stairwell. The logo on the T-shirt he’s wearing looks like a pastiche of a Soviet flag, which reminds me of one of our first Spectator covers about him: ‘Is Cameron a revolutionary?’ we asked. The answer turned out to be yes. Lower taxes and welfare reform led to the greatest jobs boom in history. Inequality fell to its lowest for a generation.