Why Cameron failed the Disraeli test

The Conservative Party is the United Kingdom’s oldest and most successful political organisation.

It managed the transformation from a Victorian-era guardian of landed privilege into a standard bearer for the aspirational middle classes of the 20th century.

Above all, it was a party of survival.

In doing so, it established a set of unwritten rules governing that survival, the first and foremost of which was the provision of strong leadership. 

Benjamin Disraeli put it succinctly when he said that if the masses were not led, they would find leaders from among their own ranks — leaders of dubious quality and questionable ambitions who might ferment chaos for their own ends.

At the beginning of the 20^th century, when the fortunes of the party reached a low ebb under the leadership of Arthur Balfour, Chief Whip Alexander Acland-Hood lamented a “want of backbone” and “vacillating policies”

Disraeli was speaking of the dangers of Chartism; Acland-Hood of tariff reform, but the message was the same. Conservatives only prosper with a strong person at the helm. Someone prepared to lead rather than follow the vagaries of public opinion.

These thoughts coincide with the imminent release of the memoirs of David Cameron, who led the Conservative Party up to 2016 when he authorised the referendum on membership of the European Union that plunged the United Kingdom into a three-year still unresolved crisis.

Cameron became Prime Minister six years earlier as a mild Eurosceptic, but his time in office convinced him the country was better off inside the EU.

However, he failed to control hard-liners within Conservative ranks, and concerned over the growing influence of the right-wing UK Independence Party agreed to a referendum on membership.

That was a mistake, and a failure of leadership, followed by allowing Ministers to campaign for leaving the EU while still in office, even though the official position of the Government was to remain.

That gave respectability to the Leave campaign, while presenting the picture of a Government that was trying to have it both ways.

Agreeing to the referendum was the moment Cameron lost control.

A strong leader in the Tory tradition of Disraeli might have sacked the Leavers from the Cabinet; announced that the UK would not leave the EU until a party dedicated to that aim won a majority of seats in the House of Commons at a General Election – and then, perhaps, called one himself.

In interviews connected with his book Cameron comes across with a mixture a mea culpa and anger over Brixiteers for “trashing the Government”.

He says the 2016 referendum result left him hugely depressed and recognises that some people “will never forgive me”.

He has launched into the tactics of current Prime Minister Boris Johnson, claiming his sole reason for committing himself to the Leave campaign was to advance his own career.

Indirectly he blames the electorate for preferring Leave’s “powerful emotional arguments” over the “technical and economic arguments” of Remain.

In other words he is refusing to accept full responsibility for a failure, at a crucial point in the country’s fortunes, to have said: “Enough – it is my way or the highway.”

Disraeli would have appreciated the need to face down political foes — even those in his own party.

Balfour would have understood the reasons Cameron failed to do so.