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The recycling of David Cameron is the nearest that Rishi Sunak has ever got to a green policy.
Cameron, recalled to life from the £25,000 shepherd’s hut complete with wood-burning stove and a lobbying scandal, seems to have got himself in shape for what he knew was coming.
Weird, because only recently he was criticising the Prime Minister for his HS2 decision. Just a few small details need to be sorted out as Cameron isn’t even an MP but has been made a life peer in order to become Foreign Secretary.
There are details like his accountability to the House of Commons. There are the small details like an unelected Prime Minister giving this job to an unelected ex-prime minister.
There is the possibly bigger detail, like glossing over the way Cameron was involved in intense lobbying for the then soon-to-be bankrupt Greensill Capital to access Covid loans.
Should we just chillax about this as this was one of his feted qualities; his ability to switch off, do some karaoke and get a good night’s sleep.
His resurrection, though, is seen by some as a move to moderation, a nod that Mr Sunak wants to move away from the right of his party, but is it? Is it really?
Suella Braverman, the former home secretary, had to go not apparently because she preaches the politics of hate and division, but because she was completely ineffective in her job. This is her second sacking, remember.
Her dreams of deporting the desperate and taking away the tents of homeless people are the fantasies of a sadist. That this appeals to some Tories is always going to be a problem and she may yet haunt them if the headbangers decide to congregate around her. They may well do.
The battle between Home Counties One Nation Tories and a newer force that unites the evangelical Right, like Miriam Cates and Danny Kruger, with Farage groupies continues.
The centre cannot hold and it is not clear what being a Conservative means any more. This is not just about the dregs of a 13-year administration, it is about the complete collage of any unifying principles.
We have seen Keir Starmer drag his party back from such division and of course though the Left remain split in all kinds of ways and many are unhappy about Labour, the delusions of the Corbyn era are now firmly in the past.
Somehow though Cameron’s appointment catapults us right back into the past. He walked away from the mess he created with Brexit, or as that astute political intellect Danny Dyer memorably put it, “He’s in Nice with his trotters up. He should be held accountable for it.”
We are going backwards with no women in key jobs for the first time since 2010, just a quad of privately educated blokes. The trouble is when we look back, we see Cameron’s twin legacies of Brexit and austerity as causing huge fractures within his party and within the country.
The desperate state of public services is because of his and George Osborne’s policies. Will voters want to be reminded of this? His foreign policy achievements are dubious, to say the least.
Syria’s Assad regime butchered its own people. Libya became ungovernable. Early on in his premiership a Downing Street aide said that Cameron thought “the world is where you go on holiday”. Indeed.
For in 2020 it was reported that he and billionaire Lex Greensill went camping in the desert with Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed Bin Salman in order to lobby him. He has kept close contacts with China.
In the Middle East who knows? He may bump into Tony Blair, the former prime minister, who may be lined up to do some humanitarian work for Israel. The mind boggles at the exes all still working it, all falling upwards.
I have heard some Tories say that this appointment is a sign of Sunak’s ability to think big but was there not one of his 350 MPs he thought was up to the job?
Is the pool of talent such an ever-decreasing circle that the man responsible for so much disharmony with his lazy assumption that he could chillax his way through a referendum has to come back? Should we expect Liz Truss to pop up again soon?
The party wants to signal stability but there are now so many bonkers outliers surrounding it, many with big public profiles, it cannot. Braverman will continue to create trouble. Boris Johnson and his cheerleader Nadine Dorries are stirring it up.
Nigel Farage, the former Ukip leader, may well be in the jungle among the cockroaches, but he will be back richer, thinner and doubtless with a lot of new supporters. Those with links across the Atlantic to the Republicans will be touting their wares.
You cannot reshuffle a pack when half the cards are missing, damaged and the joker has already been played.
Every Conservative value – stability, moderation, managing the economy – has gone down the drain. They are the party of chaos now, tearing chunks out of each other while staring into the abyss.
Now you see it and er… now you keep on seeing it. No sleight of hand can hide the void where there used to be a political party.
With David Cameron’s appointment the Conservatives are heading towards full civil war
When we look back, the former PM's legacies of Brexit and austerity caused huge fractures within his party and within the country