Trotters up, or down? Even if you once admired Danny Dyer’s immortal summary of post-Brexit David Cameron – “He’s in Europe, in Nice, with his trotters up” – there’s a strong case for wishing he’d stayed that way.

When Cameron’s trotters were up, we were at least spared the surely more distressing spectacle of his trotters blithely ascending the moral high ground. When he was in Nice he wasn’t travelling the world and, with all the authority of a man who used to press the services of Lex Greensill on his former colleagues, educating it on his old speciality, “the right thing to do”.

Amazingly, given how often Cameron repeated this catchphrase as prime minister, no one in the UK thought to respond, as congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene recently did: “Frankly, he can kiss my ass.” The US House of Representatives’ speaker, Mike Johnson, subsequently refused Cameron a meeting about Ukraine, even after being warned by the foreign secretary, in a US opinion piece, about “appeasement”. “This is personal for me,” Cameron wrote. “My grandfather stormed the beaches of Normandy under covering fire from US warships.” We can only speculate whether a less performative approach might have been more diplomatically effective.

Last week, Benjamin Netanyahu, also unbeguiled, said pointedly after meeting Cameron: “We will make our decisions ourselves.”

Although Cameron is, of course, only one of thousands of disgraced and unwanted public schoolboys dispatched, over the years, to advance British interests........

© The Guardian