Dave-ja vu
Government reshuffle, Issue 1611 THE biggest surprise of Rishi Sunak's post-Suella reshuffle was the political resurrection of David Cameron. With James Cleverly moving to the Home Office, the post of foreign secretary became free – and, according to Sunak, not a single one of the Tory party's 348 other MPs was suitable.

Bringing back relics from a party's more successful era (that's saying something, Ed.) has a chequered history: Ted Heath did it with Alec Douglas-Home, and Gordon Brown did it with Peter Mandelson. Both lost the next election.

While the papers will talk up Cameron's experience, this is only his second job in government: thanks to the long New Labour years, he came in as prime minister in 2010 having never held a ministerial post.

An affair to remember
Still, it's easy to see why Call Me Lord Dave accepted the offer. He has struggled (though not in the financial sense) since leaving Number 10, having proved through the Greensill affair to have been not just an ethically questionable lobbyist but also incompetent (if well-paid, at a reported £7m).

In 2021 a committee of MPs found that Cameron's lobbying efforts on behalf of the dubious financier "showed a significant lack of judgment, especially given that his ability to use an informal approach was aided by his previous position of prime minister".

Unabashed, Dave has more recently been taking Chinese money, lobbying on behalf of a Sri Lankan port project funded by Beijing and described by Tory backbencher Tim Loughton as "a classic example of how China buys votes and influence in developing countries".

And this summer parliament's intelligence and security committee expressed the view that Cameron's post-prime ministerial appointment as vice-chair of the China-UK investment fund had been partly engineered by the Chinese government.

Former Tory chairman and ex-governor of Hong Kong Lord (Chris) Patten had told the committee of Beijing's use of "elite capture" and "cultivation of useful idiots" in pursuit of its causes. All of which makes Cameron just the man to handle China, a country that Sunak has called "an epoch-defining challenge to the international order"!

The ghost of Europe
Cameron will of course also be responsible for both the Middle East and our future relationship with Europe – which, if you remember, he thought would be better inside the EU. Still, going to the Lords means he can skip potentially angry encounters with Brexiteer MPs, while Foreign Office mandarins will be delighted to have a Remainer back in charge.