From failed Remain campaign to pints with Chinese premier – what does David Cameron’s global track record look like?
Flick back to David Cameron’s last appearance in parliament and you’ll find five final words that now seem somewhat premature – “I was the future once.”
Although this return to politics was a shock, there have been whispers for a while that the former prime minister had struggled to adjust to life outside government.
A seemingly prescient article from 2018 reported he had even been telling friends he wanted to be foreign secretary as he was “bored s***less” in the outside world.
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So what of the newly ennobled Lord Cameron’s record on the global stage?
Some are already pointing to the warm relations he sought to strike with Beijing while in power, hailing a “golden era” and inviting the Chinese premier for a pint in a local pub during his state visit.
More recent business activity has also raised eyebrows, including a visit last month to drum up investment for a Sri Lankan infrastructure project that critics fear may one day act as a Chinese military outpost.
A diplomatic pivot will most definitely be needed to adjust to the spikier approach now taken to the world’s second-largest economy.
One MP who served in the Cameron cabinet, Theresa Villiers, told Sky News: “The political landscape has changed dramatically since he resigned and MPs will want the assurance that his approach on issues such as… China will reflect where we are now, not where we were during the Cameron era in Downing Street.”
With the Israel-Hamas war also set to occupy much of the new foreign secretary’s time, his experience in the Middle East is worthy of inspection too.
In office during the Arab Spring, he oversaw airstrikes in Libya that paved the way for the overthrow of the country’s leader Muammar Gaddafi.
After initial claims of a new era of freedom, the North African state eventually descended into violence with MPs on the Foreign Affairs Committee criticising the intervention as ill-informed and lacking a coherent strategy.
But it’s Brexit that stands as David Cameron’s biggest foreign policy legacy.
The leader of the Remain campaign, he failed to convince voters and quit as an MP just as parliament was grappling with the chaotic fallout from the vote.
But his former national security adviser Lord Peter Ricketts says his old boss “accepts where we are now” and has been put in office “to take a firm grip on crises while the prime minister is concentrating on domestic affairs for the next year”.
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Since leaving Downing Street himself, the one-time Tory leader hasn’t been short of job offers.
He’s taken on a variety of roles, including president of a dementia charity and chairman of the National Citizen Service.
His corporate endeavours have caused more trouble though.
In 2018, he started working for the now-defunct financial services firm Greensill Capital, brought on board by Australian billionaire Lex Greensill – someone he had links with while in government.
Newspapers later revealed he had approached several Whitehall contacts to try and get the company access to a COVID loans scheme.
While being cleared of any wrongdoing, the affair shone a spotlight on the rules around lobbying.
One of the journalists who covered the affair, Duncan Mavin, says it could still cause Rishi Sunak trouble.
“There are currently criminal investigations into Greensill Capital in Switzerland and in Germany, there’s an ongoing [Serious Fraud Office] investigation… and there are multibillion-dollar lawsuits all over the world… and each one of these is going to involve lots of additional information that’s going to come out about Cameron’s role”, said the author.
Picked for his experience, this familiar face comes with baggage too.
The man who once sequestered himself away in a luxury shepherd’s hut to pen his memoirs now has at least one more chapter to write.