David Cameron is wrong. A Brexit referendum was not inevitable and the blame lies with him

What a pity that David Cameron didn’t quietly nudge the Queen to intervene in the EU referendum, as he did before the one on Scottish independence two years earlier.

Could the “raising of an eyebrow… even a quarter of an inch”, have tipped the Brexit vote too? Perhaps, if the Queen had repeated her 2014 hope that “people will think very carefully about the future”.

The pro-Brexit press claims the Queen as one of their own. It would, wouldn’t it? Buckingham Palace disputed a headline that she backed Brexit. We don’t know her views. We do know her prime minister believed strongly it was in the national interest to remain in the EU, not least for economic reasons. True, she is not the Queen of Europe. But with no deal still in the frame, we know now Brexit could be the catalyst for the breakup of the UK, with the possible loss of Northern Ireland as well as Scotland. We know the Queen’s view about that.

In an unprecedented rebuke, the palace made clear its “displeasure and annoyance” that Cameron disclosed to the BBC his request for her to intervene in the Scottish referendum. But the former prime minister might not lose too much sleep about the controversy. It draws more attention to his very readable memoirs, For the Record, and shifts the spotlight to a referendum he won rather than lost.

But not for long. He will never escape the shadow of Brexit. I found his argument that an EU referendum was inevitable unconvincing. This is, after all, the man who once told his party to stop “banging on about Europe”. He could have continued to stand up to the headbangers doing the banging. He did so when he took on his party on issues such as gay marriage. I was in the Tory conference hall when he announced his support for it. The few seconds of silence felt much longer. Would somebody heckle or shout “no!?” Eventually, Tory members applauded, a seminal moment in Cameron’s successful modernisation of his party.

He could have shown brave leadership on Europe too. Instead, he allowed the Eurosceptic tail to wag the dog, and we are where we are today. Cameron argues convincingly that Boris Johnson came out for Leave because it was the right thing for his Tory leadership ambitions rather than the country. But Cameron made a similar, if lower-profile, choice when he pledged to pull his party out of the mainstream centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) during the 2005 leadership contest. His main rival, David Davis, reckoned the move cost him the votes of 40 Tory MPs. In the book, Cameron denies “opportunistic reasons” but admits it undoubtedly helped him win over Eurosceptic MPs.

The decision would return to haunt him. Angela Merkel, the EPP’s figurehead and most important player on the EU stage, never understood it or forgave him. Might Cameron have won a better deal if he had renegotiated the UK’s membership terms from inside the EPP family? I suspect so.

This was part of a pattern. Cameron joined the Brussels-bashing that began in the Thatcher era; he should not have been surprised it was hard to make the case for EU membership in the referendum. Cameron insists he was not “appeasing populism” but confronting it head-on. Yet George Osborne, his close ally who warned against a referendum, was right when he told the BBC series The Cameron Years: “David Cameron was just one of a number of British prime ministers who had fed this idea that we were different than Europe, that Brussels was to blame and that the public ultimately had to have a say, and we’ve all paid a price for it in my view.”

His book does nothing to dispel my view that Cameron got his referendum timing all wrong. Perhaps through his natural over-confidence, and a desire to move on to the social issues he wanted his legacy to be, he told civil servants he wanted the public vote at the earliest possible date. The legislation allowed him to delay it until December 2017. His book omits the crucial factor that just might have tipped a 2017 referendum the other way. Would the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House have convinced enough voters that the UK’s most reliable friends and natural partners lay closer to home?

Cameron could have had a very different legacy – 10 years in Downing Street, a groundbreaking coalition and completing unfinished business such as a cap on social care costs (one of his greatest regrets), as well as on mental health and life chances. Unfortunately, history’s verdict might be unkinder to him because the Brexit story is not over yet. The man who pledged to keep Scotland in the UK and Britain in the EU might yet fail spectacularly on both fronts.