I’m sorry because I failed: An interview with David Cameron

‘How have you been?’ David Cameron asks, bounding up to meet me. Fine, I say, then make the mistake of asking him the same question. His face drops. ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Well. So-so.’ Watching the political news, he says, has been getting him down (in a way it didn’t when he was in office) and if you’ve picked up a newspaper in recent days, you’ll know why. His memoir, For the Record, is out and the extracts make it sound like a 700-page apology note to the nation. He’s sorry for the referendum result. Sorry for what came after. And above all, sorry for letting villains like Boris Johnson and Michael Gove get away with it.

Standing in his jogging kit, fresh from his morning run, the former prime minister still looks a bit deflated. His Big Sorry, he says, is a prerequisite for being heard on anything else. ‘In my position, you can’t really complain and say: forget about the referendum and read the rest of the book,’ he says.