'Tories bringing ex-PM back from dead is the definition of zombie government'

18 November 2023 , 17:52

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David Cameron arrives in Downing Street to attend the weekly Cabinet meeting in London (Image: Anadolu via Getty Images)

Best piece of news I got this week – by quite a significant number of miles – is that they have made a film out of The Fall Guy. Remember it?

Saturday teatime, Lee Majors, Douglas Barr, Heather Thomas. And what a theme tune: The Unknown Stuntman. Magnificent. Normally, I hate remakes. Never comes out good. But the source material is so brilliant and Ryan Gosling is in it. It can’t possibly fail.

Anyways – and watch this for a segue – as comebacks go, it’s quite the opposite of the one we got this week with Lord David Cameron. I’ve written in this column before many, many times, the Government is scraping the bottom of the barrel.

David Cameron is back in Government

The last couple of years feels like one endless reshuffle. But this time they have gone through the barrel then found an old one and scraped the bottom of that. Some welcomed him back. The usual crew. A familiar face around the place.

But come on. Have we the ­collective memory of goldfish? This is the man, remember, who was and adviser to Greensill Capital, the financial firm that went down in 2021 in what was described by the chairman of the Standards in Public Life Committee as the “biggest lobbying scandal in a generation”.

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He is also the man who took us out of the EU – arguably the single most ­devastating blow to the country in, well, ­generations – then walked off whistling. Now he’s back. Newly minted peer, Foreign Secretary, all the rest of it. If you’ve ever doubted for a second this lot are built on cronyism, let this appointment put your mind at rest.

He was a chancer on the way out. The only bright spot is that Mr Sunak found, from somewhere, the courage to get rid of his toxic Home Secretary, Suella Braverman. Naturally, she’s not gone quietly. A ranting, typically unhinged resignation letter that reads like someone on Tripadvisor who’s just back from a bad time at a Toby Carvery. (Note: It is impossible to have a bad time at a Toby Carvery.)

Surely this brings a general ­election closer? We can’t continue with these lunatics falling out with each other, jostling for position while the country burns. Isn’t it the very definition of a zombie government to bring a former Prime Minister back from the dead?

It must happen soon. I’m ­confident. In fact, I took a bet to that effect this week, at the bar of my new favourite pub in the world, the Lord Nelson, Sutton-on-Trent, where I was in a rare good mood and susceptible to a bit of ­optimistic gambling. £3.80 a pint, open fire, dogs allowed. Happiest I’ve been in a long time. It’s not going to last.

Keir Mudie