What happened to Cameron’s original retirement plan?

When David Cameron started contemplating life after Downing Street, he settled quite quickly on a model of what it should look like. He would stay on the backbenches, providing advice and wisdom to whoever came after him, earn a little bit of extra money while still working as an MP, and continue in public service with charities and others. In 2016, he outlined his approach to me as we sat in a cafe in Witney, and I wrote it up in my book, Why We Get The Wrong Politicians:

He mourned the number of former ministers who had departed at the 2015 election, and suggested that you could do other things alongside being an MP if you did fancy a little bit more income to make up the ministerial salary you had lost. ‘John Major is a better model than Blair,’ he told me, as we discussed what sort of ex-prime minister he wanted to be.

It seemed an admirable plan: use his experience to inform politics in the future, avoid an ostentatious spree of earning money, and develop a reputation as a measured grandee.