Four days ago David Cameron was having lunch with friends, including his old cabinet colleague Andrew Mitchell. If the former prime minister knew then that he would be appointed Mitchell’s boss in less than a week – the coup de grace in Monday’s dramatic government reshuffle – he did not let on.
“He didn’t mention anything about a return to government,” said one person who knows what was discussed at the lunch. “But it was clear his appetite for politics was still there.”
Downing Street on Monday revealed Cameron would be taking over at the Foreign Office, in the most unexpected political return since Gordon Brown appointed Peter Mandelson as business secretary in 2008. A spokesperson said the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, had approached Cameron with the idea, though would not confirm reports that the offer was made as late as this weekend.
Cameron is the third former prime minister to become foreign secretary since 1900, following Arthur Balfour and Alec Douglas-Home, and the third cabinet minister in recent decades to serve from the House of Lords.
His allies say he was desperate to return to government, having failed to find a role that fulfilled him outside politics. Since leaving Downing Street, Cameron has worked as president of Alzheimer’s Research UK and as a teacher at New York University Abu Dhabi, but also more controversially as an adviser to Greensill Capital, the failed financial services company.
Friends say that unlike his great friend George Osborne, who has worked recently as the editor of the Evening Standard and the chair of the British Museum, Cameron never really enjoyed private-sector work.
Osborne said on his new podcast, Political Currency: “There was a bit of him [Cameron] … that died inside, which was the public service element – which he tried to fill with other things like his very important work for Alzheimer’s, but it wasn’t the same.
“And now I think, when I was speaking to him about it, it’s like the sound of the trumpet, back on the playing field, the political playing fields, and serving your country.”
Another friend said Cameron had always talked about returning as foreign secretary, though he had originally hoped to do so under an Osborne premiership. “He still has his political mojo,” said one.
Before Monday, Cameron’s last high-profile appearance in Downing Street was his resignation speech in 2016 – though he made headlines not so much with what he said but by the nonchalant way he appeared to hum to himself as he turned to go back inside No 10 for the last time.
Just a year after winning an unexpected majority, the former prime minister had found his reputation tarnished by having lost the Brexit referendum.
He spent much of the next few years in his £25,000 luxury shed, from where he wrote his memoirs. That book was praised by its critics for the honesty with which he wrote about the mistakes he had made on Brexit, but it sold badly, chalking up only a fifth of the sales of Tony Blair’s autobiography during its first year.
It was in his book that Cameron first responded directly to the lurid claims in an earlier book by Lord Ashcroft and Isabel Oakeshott, which said he had once inserted “a private part of his anatomy” into the mouth of a dead pig. Cameron used his autobiography to label those rumours as “false and ludicrous”.
As well as his writing and his work for Alzheimer’s Research, Cameron became chair of the board of patrons at the National Citizens’ Service, an organisation he had set up while in office to embody his idea of the “big society”.
In February 2020, he turned down an approach by his political nemesis Boris Johnson to lead the UK’s preparation for the Cop26 conference in Glasgow, in part because he did not want to work for Johnson, but mainly because he did not want to work for Johnson’s chief of staff, Dominic Cummings.
But it was his work for the financial services company Greensill which propelled Cameron into the media spotlight once more, after it was revealed he had lobbied ministers to provide the company with access to coronavirus loan support in 2021, a year before it collapsed.
A subsequent inquiry by the Treasury select committee found he had shown a “significant lack of judgment” in sending dozens of messages pleading his employer’s case, including to Sunak himself. “Apologies for troubling you again, but I can’t see the case against helping to fund supply chains and SMEs in this way,” he messaged Sunak, who was then chancellor, in April 2021. “Could you try and give it another nudge over the finish line.”
Cameron swerved questions about his role at Greensill on Monday, telling reporters: “All those things were dealt with by the Treasury select committee and other inquiries at the time, and as far as I’m concerned they have been all dealt with and in the past.”
The former prime minister is also facing difficult questions on his recent work on China. While in government, Cameron oversaw the so-called “golden era” in UK-China relations, and afterwards was appointed vice-chair of a £1bn China-UK investment fund. He has also been helping to drum up financing for a controversial port project in Sri Lanka, which is part of the flagship belt and road initiative of the Chinese president, Xi Jinping.
In a recent report, MPs on the cross-bench international security committee warned Cameron’s role with the investment fund could be “in some part engineered by the Chinese state to lend credibility to Chinese investment”.
For the most part, Cameron has not intervened in domestic politics, though he made headlines last month when he publicly criticised Sunak’s decision to cancel the northern leg of the HS2 high-speed rail line. The decision would add to criticisms the country was “moving in the wrong direction”, he said at the time.
Allies say that he has remained loyal to Sunak and the Conservatives on other issues, however, with one friend saying his intervention on HS2 showed he was a “sensible, grown-up, moderate person”.
One person close to Cameron said he intended to act as a “consigliere” to Sunak, much as William Hague did when serving as Cameron’s foreign secretary. Hague is close to both Sunak and Cameron, and is believed by many to have helped engineer the latter’s return to government. “Hague’s fingerprints are all over this,” said one of Cameron’s friends.
Others hope that Cameron’s return to government will bring a return for some of the causes he previously championed, including the environment.
One source pointed out that he had long been one of the loudest champions within the Conservative party for taking action on the climate crisis, being pictured hugging huskies in the Arctic to highlight the impact it was having. “The huskies are back,” the person said.
Sunak’s advisers hope that with the Tories trailing more than 20 points in the polls, the most important thing Cameron will bring back to Downing Street is a winning touch.
“This is a prime minister who won two elections in a very, very volatile political world,” said one ally. “That achievement looks more impressive as history passes.”
