On a train recently, my friend Nick expressed a great deal of contempt for Danny Alexander. Nick is precise about this: his contempt is not just for Alexander but for the Liberal Democrat Party that facilitated and abetted austerity with such Orange Book enthusiasm. This is not an unusual response to Danny Alexander, who was memorably described by Harriet Harman as a ginger rodent. Harman later apologised. Alexander's response was to note that rodents do valuable work cleaning up mess others leave behind. He was, without apparently meaning to be, describing his own role with some accuracy.
Alexander, as Chief Secretary to the Treasury from 2010 to 2015, sat at the right hand of George Osborne and helped design a decade of austerity that didn't need to happen. He did this as a Liberal Democrat, which meant the coalition government could present its choices as cross-party consensus rather than ideology — a progressive face on a conservative project. He has since been knighted, worked at the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and is now Chief Executive of Infrastructure Finance and Sustainability at HSBC, where he leads sustainable finance and clean tech initiatives. The man who helped deny sustainable investment to the people who needed it most is now being paid very well to think about sustainability. These things happen.
The question Nick and I were really arguing about, on that train, was simpler: who was the worst Prime Minister? It is a competitive field. But Cameron has a strong claim, and the claim rests not on what he did but on what he chose not to do — and what that choice then produced.
In the years following 2008, the cost of government borrowing fell to historically low levels. The state could borrow money at near-zero interest rates. This was not a secret. It was not a technical detail buried in Treasury reports. It was the central economic fact of the moment. The argument for using that money to invest — in infrastructure, in housing, in the public services that had been depleted by decades of managed decline — was straightforward: when money is this cheap, you borrow and build. You don't balance the books by taking the money out of the people who have the least of it.
Cameron chose austerity anyway. So did Osborne. So did Alexander, who provided the Liberal Democrat face that made the whole arrangement look reasonable rather than what it was: a political choice dressed up as economic necessity.
The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire identified something uncomfortable about how oppression works: the oppressed, having spent their lives inside a system that presents domination as the natural form of power, don't instinctively seek liberation. They seek to become the oppressor. They've seen what power looks like, and power looks like punishment. When their turn comes, they reach for what they know.
A friend of mine — a Muslim convert, disabled, on benefits — has shifted over the years from believing in open borders to something more complicated. She has seen things I haven't: the inside of immigrant communities, the corruption and the exploitation, the abuse of a law-abiding system by people who came here to escape exactly that. Her disillusionment is real and it is earned. But I notice that she has also spent her days on the phone to Universal Credit, dictating the same complaint for the billionth time, never reaching the person responsible, never getting the callback requested — and on one occasion, having finally got far enough into the complaint to be dictating it, the landline cut out. That is what the system feels like from inside it: an exhausting loop designed to wear you down until you give up. When you live inside that loop long enough, you stop looking up at the people who built it. You start looking sideways. The immigrants become more visible than George Osborne.
Austerity was a machine for producing this condition at scale. When you cut housing benefit, close Sure Start centres, run down mental health provision, freeze tax credits, and tell people that the deficit is their fault — the result is not a population that looks at the system and thinks: this is broken, let's fix it together. The result is a population that is angry, frightened, and looking for someone to blame. And Freire's insight tells you who they will blame: not the institutions that failed them, but the people below them or beside them. Immigrants. Benefit claimants. Whoever has been placed, by the newspapers that Cameron's government was careful to cultivate, in the position of the enemy.
So austerity didn't just cause suffering in the immediate term — though it did that, measurably, in shortened lives and children in poverty and food banks that didn't exist before and proliferated after. It also reorganised the political landscape. It moved the centre of gravity rightward, year by year, grievance by grievance. It produced Brexit. It produced Farage. It produced Reform. And it produced a Labour Party that, in order to remain electorally viable, had to chase that rightward drift — which meant that even the official opposition ended up defending the basic architecture of what Cameron and Osborne had built.
Truss was a disaster, but she was a disaster in weeks. The markets corrected her. Cameron's damage was structural and generational. It embedded itself in the political culture, in the way people thought about what government was for and who deserved what. You cannot point at a single moment when it went wrong. It went wrong slowly, and then all at once, and by the time it had gone all the way wrong, the people responsible were long gone.
Cameron has written a memoir. He expresses regret about Brexit, which he calls the thing that went wrong. He does not appear to spend much time on the decade of cheap money he didn't spend, or on what that decade produced. Perhaps he doesn't see the connection. Perhaps he does, and has decided that the connection is not one he wishes to examine in public.
Alexander lost his seat in 2015, when 50.1% of his constituents voted for the Scottish National Party and 31.3% voted for him. He was offered a peerage and declined it. He found other things to do. The knighthood came anyway, in the Dissolution Honours, signed off in the last days of the government whose choices he had helped to make.
The cost didn't fall on him. It fell on the people in the houses that weren't built, the children in the Sure Start centres that closed, the families who learned to use food banks, the communities that watched their high streets empty out and concluded, not unreasonably, that someone must be responsible — and were then handed a list of suspects by people who knew exactly what they were doing.
Nick's contempt, on the train, was for Alexander specifically. But the contempt belongs to the whole arrangement: to a political culture that could look at historically cheap money and choose, instead, to take it from the people who had nothing left to give. That is Cameron's legacy. Not Brexit, which was a symptom. The disease was the decade that made Brexit feel, to millions of people, like the only thing left worth trying.