Moving swiftly on

Today's news cycle started with analysis of yesterday's budget delivered by UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, but interest rapidly waned as more important issues emerged.

Let's face it, yesterday's fiscal [non]event was pretty much an irrelevance anyway. Apart from having shot Labour's non-dom tax fox and hinted at an autumn general election there wasn't much more to be said about it. The government's in a holding pattern until it gets kicked out of office. Move along, nothing to see here. Really, the budget statement was an hour of our lives we'll never get back. Almost anything would be a welcome distraction.

This is not to detract from the importance of the news stories that took over the airspace today, two of which were events of real pitch and moment. The first was the joint press conference in Berlin by UK Foreign Secretary, Lord David Cameron, and his German counterpart, Annalena Baerbock, promoting post-Brexit Anglo-German co-operation and a pan-European approach to the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts. The second was the press conference in Washington DC with US Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, and NATO Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, marking Sweden's accession to the organisation - a truly momentous occasion.

As far as the former event was concerned, it was interesting to compare Cameron's suave, urbane, confident performance on the European stage with Hunt's feeble presentation in the House of Commons. Much as it pains me to admit it, Cameron looked and sounded every inch the international statesman whereas Hunt, for all his experience in government, looked ill-at-ease and out of his depth - in fact like a rabbit caught in headlights. It would be easy to put this down to Cameron's six years as Prime Minister but that isn't enough to explain it. Can you imagine Rishi Sunak ever cutting such a figure in international affairs, despite his stint in Downing Street?

It was interesting, too, that Cameron was the Prime Minister who called the EU Referendum. Despite this debacle, here he was back in the heart of the EU, looking entirely at ease, a citizen of the world, absolutely in his element. Part of the reason for this must lie in Cameron's innate sense of entitlement. While Sunak, like Cameron, may have attended a top public school and Oxford University, and is clearly bolstered by enormous wealth, his background as the son of a migrant family means he will never be accepted as a full member of the British Establishment in the way that Cameron is, despite currently occupying the most powerful public office in the land.

This is undoubtedly a sad indictment of British (specifically English) society but also a deeply entrenched and, regrettably, probably immutable aspect of our current constitutional settlement. One would hope that the overthrow of a political system in which the monarchy and an unelected Upper Chamber, including almost one hundred seats still reserved for hereditary landowners, would spell the end of such deeply-entrenched social snobbery, although personally I wouldn't bet on it.

The fact that Cameron, eight years after leaving office, appears to have such gravitas reflects not so much on his inherent abilities (he always seemed a weak PM, a perception heightened by his spending the greater part of his tenure leading a coalition government) but on the shitshow that followed his resignation. After a series of weak successors: Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and now Rishi Sunak, it would be some feat not to cut a more commanding figure. As the world moves on, yesterday's nonentities further diminish in stature.

This tends to be the way with rearview mirrors.

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