The humiliating post-premiership of David Cameron is the gift that keeps on giving. He might have been gone from No. 10 for more than eight years, but pretty much everything involving him that’s happened in British national life since his departure has been a reminder of the awful emptiness of his time in office.
At most, the Big Society was a woolly phrase – and the NCS
The list of Cameron embarrassments is as long as the list of his accomplishments is short. There was Dave’s time as a spiv lobbyist, failing to charm former colleagues in government for Lex Greensill. There was a cameo appearance as foreign secretary, a spell distinguished by precisely zero foreign policy successes. He’s even failed at being idle: fellow members of his posh golf club are annoyed at his charmless conduct on the links.
Now we learn that the National Citizens’ Service (NCS) is being abolished, as the government – sensibly – rethinks wider support for young people who face dreadful rates of mental health problems and related economic inactivity. This has made poor Lord Cameron sad. Not, apparently, because of the impact on other people, but because of what it means for him.
It’s important to understand how important the NCS is to Cameron. Insofar as anything can matter to a politician whose defining feature was not caring about things, NCS mattered to DC because it was supposed to help prove that he mattered, that his time in office meant something.
I am deeply saddened and disappointed that the new Labour Government has decided to close down National Citizen Service, @NCS.
— David Cameron (@David_Cameron) November 12, 2024
I began pilots for NCS in opposition, to help build bridges across social divides. Young people from different backgrounds, different areas of the…
The vital bit of Cameron’s whiny comment on the end of NCS is this: ‘It was the Big Society in action.’ To Dave, this is self-explanatory, but if they ever knew about it at all, most people have now forgotten the Big Society.
The ‘Big Society’ was one of Cameron’s pre-government slogans, but it was meant to be a lot more than that. Cameron sometimes like to think of himself as an intellectual radical re-thinking the relationship between the state and the population.
On a wall in his Downing Street flat he had a copy of an 2010 Economist cover showing him with a Union flag mohawk under the headline ‘Radical Britain’. That summed him up rather well, a very conventional establishment chap who fancied himself daring and bold – because other establishment chaps said so.
But what did that ‘radicalism’ mean? Sure, there was austerity, but if there was an intellectual strategy informing cuts to public spending, it didn’t extend beyond ‘only cut stuff our voters don’t use or care about’. That’s routine politics, not a big idea.
So the Big Society (naturally reduced by many to ‘BS’) was Dave’s attempt at such a big idea, some intellectual heft to support the shiny-faced spin of his leadership. Unfortunately, Cameron never really worked out what it meant – that would have meant doing some hard work and hard thinking, after all. At most, the Big Society was a woolly phrase – and the NCS.
And now that is gone too. Cameron’s legacy is now even thinner: underfunded services; some school reforms that someone else came up with; and the accidental end of Britain’s EU membership. Whatever you think of Brexit and whatever its eventual consequences, it can never be counted to Cameron’s credit because he didn’t want it. It sprang from his errors and his weaknesses, not his decisions and his strengths.
Almost exactly 200 years before Cameron left office, Shelley completed Ozymandias, a poem that could have been written for him:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
That sneer of cold command is still here, but the NCS, the Big Society and Cameron’s vain dreams of domestic reform are gone. Now nothing remains, Dave, beside Brexit – and the hand that mocked.
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