David Cameron or the illusion of believing that the worst of Brexit is over

It is not arrogance or evil. It is that ability that a certain British upper class has to avoid any burden of conscience – happiness is a combination of good health and bad memory – and to assume that there is always someone behind who will sweep up the garbage they leave along the way. David Cameron, the politician who caused the divorce of the United Kingdom from the European Union and plunged his country into a sinkhole that has lasted almost a decade, walked among television cameras and photographers this Thursday with poise and apparently healthy health. of iron. He had agreed to give an appearance with questions to the Foreign Press Association in London. There are more correspondents in this city than in Brussels.

It was probably the only opportunity to talk about Brexit in an election campaign in which both the Conservative candidate, Rishi Sunak, and the Labor candidate, Keir Starmer, have conspired not to dedicate a single minute of their time to the issue that has most poisoned the British politics. Cameron’s response was surprising for its mixture of naivety and cynicism.

“I think what is going well is the redesign of a new relationship model in which we are friends, neighbors and allies of the EU without needing to be members. The clearest example has been the collaboration with respect to Ukraine,” the politician defended when they again demanded an assessment of the last eight years.

“I haven’t changed my mind.”

“I have spent a lot of time thinking about this issue, thinking about politics, and the rise of certain forces [en relación con la derecha populista de Nigel Farage]not only in the United Kingdom, but throughout the world,” Cameron reflected in a speech rehearsed a thousand times, which even served to justify a memoir, For The Record (For the Record) with which he obtained huge benefits. “Once we lost the referendum, I did the right thing by resigning and I haven’t changed my mind at all,” he explained.

Cameron was lucky that the current Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, offered him the Foreign Affairs portfolio just after relations between London and Brussels began to soften, after the conflictive years of former presidents Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, who were about to lead to a trade war between the two blocs. The United Kingdom unilaterally blew up everything agreed in the so-called Irish Protocol, which incorporated the Northern Irish territory into the internal market and customs area of ​​the EU. It was a way to preserve peace in the region and fit it into the post-Brexit era, but the Conservative Government allowed itself to be carried away by unionist radicalism and even threatened to breach its international obligations.

Sunak and the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, managed to straighten out a poisoned situation with the so-called Windsor Framework Agreement, signed in that English town. Cameron has praised that pact, the first serious effort to bring sanity to a devilish diplomatic standoff, as a sign of how well, he says, things have been going lately.

“The European part of my work as Foreign Minister has been the clearest and calmest, because I believe that this new model between friends and partners, not between EU members, is working (…). “It is a constructive and fruitful working relationship, whether it is negotiating electric vehicles, financial services or the UK’s re-entry into the Horizon scientific programme,” Cameron boasted.

Nothing to point out regarding the continuous friction at customs, the dozens of British export companies that have ended up going bankrupt or the loss of talent in companies and public services with the fear of European citizens and the end of freedom of movement.

Even the resurgence of the populist right of Nigel Farage, the person who promoted Brexit and now revives the xenophobic and anti-immigration discourse with the Reform UK party, is seen by Cameron as a mere electoral inconvenience: “I suspect that things What their voters want – lower taxes, less immigration and a strong defense policy – ​​are exactly what a Conservative Party government can deliver. So, unless they want to end up in the hands of a Labor Government that won’t do any of that, the best thing they can do is vote for us,” said the Foreign Minister, delighted to have been redeemed by his people and regain the foreground on the political scene.

His photo with Emmanuel Macron, Joe Biden and Olaf Scholz on the beaches of Normandy last week, to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Allied landing in World War II, was a disaster for Sunak, who received a barrage of criticism for being absent from the act. It seemed to surprise no one that he, along with world leaders, was responsible for the fact that the United Kingdom had become an international problem rather than a reliable ally in recent years.

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