David Cameron interviewed on Brexit

[olliebean]

To be fair, I feel sympathy for David Cameron over his son's death to roughly the same extent that I imagine he feels sympathy for all the people whose sons and daughters died because of his stupid ideological austerity bullshit.

[mothman]

Losing a child is unimaginable. You have no fucking idea. And, thankfully, neither do I. But I was THIS close to being there. It's fucked me and my wife up in ways you can't imagine. For a couple of hours, I thought - no, KNEW - my daughter was going to die. And then I waited four days, while she was on a ventilator, for it to happen. And then, instead, she woke up.

So damn right I have sympathy for Cameron losing his son (an infant, remember, with learning difficulties; it's not like he was Uday or Qusay Husayn, or one of Trump's idiot sons). It was a tragedy. One that was then compounded by his failure to feel concern for others or their children. Did that this mean he deserved to have had it happen? ... I don't know. I'm not sure I want to. But I do wonder if anyone saying "ha ha, he's a cunt, glad his son's dead" isn't perhaps due a David Mitchell "are we the baddies?" moment.

Or what do I know? Maybe some here will feel I deserve to have suffered like that, cosy middle-class centrist that I am? Perhaps it should have roused me to full-on socialist revolution instead of feeling sympathy for one evil Tory. I could... um... sue the NHS for botching the operation in the first place, and put the money towards BUPA cover (is that right? I'm new at this class warrioring thing)

Sorry, I'm upset and I'm ranting. Good night.

[bgmnts]

There's a difference between being glad a child is dead and having no sympathy ith David Cameron, who's existence has lead to the death of lots of children.

[Jittlebags]

Apparently David has a tattoo of a dolphin on his meatus.

[touchingcloth]

There's a difference between being glad a child is dead and having no sympathy ith David Cameron, who's existence has lead to the death of lots of children.

This. On the one hand you can recognise that a personal tragedy has affected David Cameron and that any tragedies that befall him are if not deserved then at least aren't a cause for sadness. At the same time and on the other hand you can recognise that an actual human child has died and that this is also hilarious.

[Fambo Number Mive]

In his new book For the Record, published today, the former Prime Minister attacked critics of his flagship economic policy as "hysterical" and insisted: "The job we started still needs to be finished".

This is the problem, Cameron doesn't know anyone who would be affected by austerity because everyone he knows is wealthy

He wrote: "I would argue that this was not like the 1980s. Then, the rhetoric was very tough, but the overall cuts were really quite mild. Conversely, what we were attempting in terms of cutting Government spending was far tougher in reality, but I wanted to take more or the country with me".

Thatcher's cuts were "mild"? Maybe for people like David Cameron.

"My assessment now is that we probably didn't cut enough. We could have done more, even more quickly... Those who were opposed to austerity were going to be opposed - and pretty hysterically - to whatever we did.

"Given all the hype and hostility, and yes, sometimes hatred, we might as well have ripped the plaster off with more cuts early on... The job we started still needs to be finished".

Cameron was one of the worst things to happen to the UK this century. A disgrace of a man who made life harder for the poor and easier for the rich. The second worst prime minister ever.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron-believes-boris-johnson-20093944?1

[Norton Canes]

Palace 'displeasure' at Cameron's Queen comments

The thick fuck doesn't learn, does he? Fucked up by mentioning that the CoD 'purred' over the IndyRef result, now this. Or is he on a mission to piss her off?

[José]

dude making idle chitchat: would you kill baby hitler?
prissy little foo foo baby: nobody can even begin to imagine the pain of losing a child, furthermore

[poo]

Fuck off Dave

[Replies From View]

There's a difference between being glad a child is dead and having no sympathy ith David Cameron, who's existence has lead to the death of lots of children.

Exactly.  If Cameron hadn't existed then he wouldn't have had a child in the first place.  I don't see why him being a total fucking cunt on all levels should be turned back on us just because he happened to be born.

[José]

aye and maybe his gravebaby wouldn't have been all jacked up if he wasn't the product of centuries of hapsburgesque inbreeding. really makes you think.

[jamiefairlie]

There's a difference between being glad a child is dead and having no sympathy ith David Cameron, who's existence has lead to the death of lots of children.

He was the leader of the Tories, what else did you expect him to do, enact non-cunty policies? Spare the ire for the cunts that voted him in, they're the ones that have blood on their hands.

[Paul Calf]

He's not a fucking golem. He bears full responsibility for everything he did. In a just world, he'd be in the dock.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Correct

[Fambo Number Mive]

Our Future, Our Choice are selling an "alternative memoir" called Eton Mess which is intended to be a notebook:

...On September 19th, ex Prime Minister David Cameron will release an 800 page memoir defending his decision to plunge this country into Brexit chaos.

So we're releasing Eton Mess: David Cameron's Alternative Memoir, a far shorter and far more honest account of his time in office... in fact it's so short and so honest it only contains one single sentence: "I c*cked it up."

Once read, use this book as a notebook to vent your frustrations...

[Fambo Number Mive]

Imagine if Brexit had gone the other way. All the #FBPE types who can buy their way out of public service cuts who hate him for Brexit would still be gushing over him and secretly voting Tory. Cameron would be ramping up austerity with the establishment, much of the middle class and most of the media behind him.

OK, he's still very wealthy but he's about to bring out a book which barely anyone outside the establishment will buy and I imagine he really misses being PM. Probably the one tiny thing about Brexit which isn't awful is what it did to Cameron.

Of course austerity will still be ramped up with a no deal Brexit as the reason given.

[Ambient Sheep]

Seems like Macmillan should have said "You've never had it so good... and you never will again."

[Menyatta Zondatta]

How did Cameron remain in any way relevant after dipping from Brexit. I'd say he made a right pig's head of the country, but he'd probably fuck it again.

[Captain Z]

Was just trying to find out how sales had been for Cameron's book. Not much info (21,000 in the first week) but found this article about his US promotional tour (he's not doing one in the UK) interesting/funny:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/10/cameron-record-set-191004104622312.html

Cameron's 'For The Record' unlikely to set many
Sales have been slow for the former prime minister on his US book tour, though his true legacy is still being written.

Washington, DC, United States - It is unusual for the audience at an author reading event to be greeted by a volunteer taking written questions in advance, and to be told: "The questions are pre-selected - maybe you'll get lucky".

Tuesday night's "sold out" event saw David Cameron - the former prime minister of the United Kingdom, now memoirist - come to town to sign and sell his book, and "to provide, for the first time, his perspective on the EU referendum and his views on the future of Britain's place in the world following Brexit".

But by the time the doors to George Washington University's 244-seat Jack Morton Auditorium were closed, dozens of seats remained unclaimed. And despite the timing of his memoir, the final chapters of his true legacy - that of Brexit, a high-stakes socioeconomic drama that threatens to ruin the world's sixth-largest national economy - have yet to be written.

The book, which retails for $36, is titled For the Record, though any form of video recording or photography was strictly banned from this event, enforced by university security guards - separate from Cameron's security detail - patrolling the aisles.

This short US tour is something of a respite for the former PM, during which he can get away with signing books backstage, far from either gushing or inquisitive readers.

What is not being answered is why, three years after leaving politics, Cameron has now left his $31,000 shepherd's hut - in which he reportedly wrote his book - to continue to avoid the public, in Britain or even in its former colony.

"To say that he will receive a hostile reception [at a UK book launch event] is an understatement," wrote the New Statesman's Martin Fletcher in September. "Much of the [British] population consider him the most disastrous prime minister of modern times - with only his two successors coming close."

But while escaping the deluge of negative UK commentary, his jaunt to the US is not without its own stinging rebuke served up by this nation's literary class: the US's most-trusted book reviewers and publications have given it the silent treatment - even though, published by HarperCollins, the book has been on the shelves for nearly two weeks.

If it happens, Britain's withdrawal from the European Union will be a seismic break from the formal trade and political consortium of which the UK has been part for more than 40 years. Brexit, the result of a 2016 referendum that Cameron instigated and oversaw, remains uncertain - as no exit treaty has yet been agreed with the EU, and a majority of parliamentarians fiercely oppose leaving the union without an agreement.

Sticking to his story

In Washington, DC, after the audience was shown a four-minute-and-20-second video of Cameron's greatest political hits, the former prime minister delivered his Brexit narrative. He claimed that because all the other EU nations agreed in December 2011 to bypass Britain and sign a euro treaty he had previously vetoed, he was essentially forced to act on behalf of Britain's national interests.

"At that moment I could see that we did have a really serious problem as well as the political pressure for a referendum," Cameron told the audience. "And so I set out, a little bit late, three years before the referendum, the case for renegotiation or a referendum. But as you can tell this did not work out the way that I wanted it to."

He added: "I felt that I was trying to deal honestly with a genuine problem in front of the country. And I think the role of politics and politicians is to try and deal with problems rather than to put them off. And when you're prime minister, you do get to realise that not doing something is also a decision."

The verdict and impact
The decision not to do something appears to have been the choice of publications on this side of the Atlantic. While coverage of Cameron's US book tour has produced a mere handful of interviews, reviews of For the Record are notable by their absence from any of US's well-established arts review publications, including the New York Review of Books and the New York Times Book Review. They are simply not there.

Over on Amazon.com's best sellers lists, Cameron's book was on Friday ranking in 26,098th position overall. It is the 1,655th most-popular memoir available on the site. That is a long way behind the Audible audiobook edition of Permanent Record, the memoir of rogue US whistle-blower Edward Snowden, which sits in 10th place, with 4.5 out of a possible five stars, which was also published at the end of September.

Cameron's autobiography has garnered just 1.8 stars, from just four customer reviews, three of which are unambiguously negative, with the remaining one being lukewarm.

One reader review was titled, "Pointless, self-serving ... at least the material matches the man!"

Another wrote: "In addition to a deep lack of genuine basic political acumen, the prime minister's flawed historic call shows a serious level of pompous hubris, adolescent cockiness, and audacious inexperience."

The coup de grace review was titled "Printed on the wrong sort of paper". Reader Greg LP, who gave For the Record two stars, began by writing, "I admit my bias by saying that I believe Mr Cameron to be by far the greatest British Prime Minister since Hugh Grant."

He continued: "To my immense disappointment, I soon discovered the pages were made of rather tough and abrasive paper ... Had the pages been made out of soft, triple ply, paper, preferably perforated, I would have easily given this book five stars."

And, for the record, this reporter's question at Tuesday's event - "If there is another referendum, will you actively support a campaign to remain in the EU?" - was not selected by the aides to the former prime minister.

And some people have been placing homemade fake covers on copies in Foyles:
https://metro.co.uk/2019/10/20/hilarious-fake-covers-placed-david-camerons-book-10950869/

[ZoyzaSorris]

Enjoyed the Al Jazeera article and the fake covers. Have a hint of wimblewrong. We sure it wasn't a Cabber?

[Ambient Sheep]

Hah!  And yeah, the "face like a satellite dish" line would tend to imply a TDT fan at the very least.

[Fambo Number Mive]

Those fake covers are funny but I hate the fact they ignore austerity and only focus on Brexit.

"Let's not remember him for the one terrible thing he did..."

For a lot of people, Cameron was pretty terrible for them even before Brexit.

[Paul Calf]

I used my privilege as a top Etonian to become Prime Minister
I fucked the economy
I killed the poor
I gave loads of money away to rich cunts
I sold more public assets and the public didn't see a penny of it.

Do they call me Dave The Nepotist?
Do they call me Dave The Destroyer?
Do they call me Dave The Scourge Of The Sick and The Poor?
Do they call me Dave The Thief?

Yet you fuck one pig's head/established ancient sovereign democracy...

[Paul Calf]

Although to be fair to our media overlords, all that stuff is just standard Tory cuntery. Fucking up the economy and breaking the Union is decidedly not the sort of thing Tories should be seen to do.

[Cuellar]

I'd like to interview him. Interview him into the fucking outer atmosphere. Interview him directly into the sun

[Fambo Number Mive]

It's annoying how the Tories are never held to account by the media for a Tory Prime Minister causing all this Brexit mess in the first place.

Mind you, this is the same media that largely ignores austerity.

[sponk]

Hate to defend DC but how did he cause it? It was put to parliament and a big majority of MPs, including Labour, voted for it

[NJ Uncut]

He's a fuckin cunt and his opinion counts for nowt. He's not worthwhile. May he get all the misery he has caused back - an unending, horrific wave of bad fortune, pain and agony.

[SteveDave]

Three weeks ago I hoyed the solitary copy the Asda in Colindale had behind some DVD players. It's still there.

[idunnosomename]

Hate to defend DC but how did he cause it? It was put to parliament and a big majority of MPs, including Labour, voted for it

he had a majority. What would be the point of labour opposing it

It's not like now with these knife-edge votes in a hung parliament