David Cameron's Political Weathering

I was at a BBQ when David Cameron became Prime Minister. I was a student, in the second year of a history degree. The bbq was proving hard to light, as the weather was a bit dodgy. So I missed Brown going. I missed the moment he realises the game was up, and stunned the political world by cwlling it a day. I missed the scramble to get David Cameron to Buckingham Palace in time to prevent a long gap between leaders.

But I was home in time to watch him arrive in Downing Street. What struck me was the choreography of it all. The Labour years had begun in the blazing sunshine of May 1997. Now it was ending in the late spring twilight of May 2010. Rather than the certainty of a booming economy and colossal landslide, Cameron was taking office amid an economic crisis, against the backdrop of a hung parliament. It seemed a perfct metaphor for the trajectory of Labour's time in office. Brave New Dawn to confusing sunset.

I suppose I should thank Cameron. He has been a part of my politicisation. I first became fairly interested in politics just before he ran to be Tory leader in 2005. He was Leader of the Opposition through my later teenage years, when I was struggling to decide what on Earth I believed in. And he was Prime Minister as my views crystallised and hardened, as I saw the country he was trying to create, and decided on the whole that it was not the one I wanted to live in. 

And now he is gone. Sunk by a referendum he did not want, he has been ejected from office barely a year after winning a majority in the Commons. Just as he got the hang of governing, he has had to give it all away.

Today it was cloudy on my way home. Cloudy with some short, sharp showers. So as David Cameron resigns and heads into the sunset, I think that's a reasonably good metaphor for his term as Prime Minister. 

He became Prime Minister in the gloom of the Great Recession, and leaves office with the storm of the EU referendum aftermath on the horizon.