Why did David Cameron not carry out his undertaking to join the Leave campaign when he didn’t get the EU to restrain the flow of immigrants in any meaningful way?

Seemingly he had everything to gain. Most, if not all, the Cabinet would have joined him, as would virtually all the Conservative Party in the Commons and the country.  Some of the 6 million Labour voters who will vote Leave tomorrow might have been permanently deflected from voting Labour again.  With Corbyn still in charge of Labour, a united Tory party would have been on course for winning big in 2020.

Cameron would have been at least a Tory hero, possibly even a British one. Instead, win or lose tomorrow, his career is effectively over, buried under a heap of rubbish of his own making: unforgiveable twisting and turning, grievous insults about Leave supporters, constant rubbishing of his own country, continuing fantasies about “reducing immigration to tens of thousands” while remaining in the EU, begging foreigners to intervene on his side.

Admiral Darlan

Cameron’s case is very reminiscent of the sorry story of a World War II Frenchman called Darlan who was Commander-in Chief of the French Navy, the fourth largest in the world, the main asset which a defeated France had in June 1940.

Darlan was asked, pleaded with in fact by Churchill, to order the fleet, intact, out of German control – to the West Indies or the USA, to eventually form up on the allied side as the chief representative of free-France. Instead he chose the defeatists – the Pétain-led Vichy régime which more or less allied itself with Germany’s pan-Europa project.

Instead of Darlan, the free-France standard was taken up by a junior general called Charles de Gaulle. He had just escaped to England from Bordeaux in a plane sent by Churchill.  As we know, de Gaulle went on to become President of France and vetoed Britain’s joining the EEC for its good and ours.

Like Darlan, Cameron seems to have an allegiance to something besides the interests of his country, not religion to be sure. Darlan put the French Navy’s visceral  antipathy to the British^[1] ahead of the interests of his country.

Cameron’s over-riding ‘cause’ seems to be the ideology of liberal internationalism. Under this heading the absurdly high contribution to overseas aid, the over-promotion of unqualified women, homosexual marriage, impractical do-gooding talk confounded by any serious analysis, all fit.  No more than Darlan could, Cameron cannot abide being associated with someone or something he hates – in this case UKIP – even when his country’s future is at stake.

End Note

[1] Darlan’s great-grand-father was killed at Trafalgar in 1805.

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