Life after No. 10 is not what David Cameron was hoping for | 7 August 2017

This article originally appeared in the Spectator in March. It is being reposted on Coffee House after the former Prime Minister was pictured letting his hair down at a festival

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 last week 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, the agency which now organises Cameron’s lucrative global lecture schedule, as ‘one of the most prominent global influencers of the early 21st century’.