Life after No. 10 is not what David Cameron was hoping for

It can be cruel, the way politics plays out. At the very moment George Osborne was telling the bemused staff of the London Evening Standard that his working life in politics had obscured a passionate desire to become a newspaper editor, a familiar figure could be seen in the fresh meat department of the Whole Foods supermarket almost directly underneath the paper’s Kensington newsroom.

That man was David Cameron, and inevitably someone with journalistic instincts spotted him, snapped him on her phone, and tweeted it.

We congratulate ourselves on the ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ nature of British politics. So it is a healthy sign that there is an informality about the man described by the Washington Speakers Bureau, as ‘one of the most prominent global influencers of the early 21st century’.

There was nevertheless a poignancy in the juxtaposition of Osborne cementing his position with a newspaper editorship while his former boss was still searching for a role.