“FOR THREE years I have kept relatively quiet about politics,” David Cameron tweeted on September 14th. His silence will soon be broken. On September 19th the memoir of Britain’s former prime minister, “For The Record”, is due to hit bookshops, offering a first-hand account of the Brexit referendum that led to his resignation in 2016. The book provides scathing assessments of Conservatives who backed the Leave campaign instead of supporting the government’s push to remain in the European Union. Mr Cameron claims, for example, that Michael Gove and Boris Johnson “left the truth at home” and behaved “appallingly” while building support for Brexit. He is particularly critical of Mr Gove, whom he describes as “an ambassador for the truth-twisting age of populism”.

Mr Cameron is rueful about the way the referendum played out. “I deeply regret the outcome and accept that my approach failed,” he writes. But he insists that he was right to organise it, since a public vote was “ultimately inevitable”. (In fact, only 10% of Britons thought membership of the EU was one of the country’s most pressing issues at the start of 2016.) The former prime minister says that he is often harangued in the street by people who blame him for the chaos that the referendum created. “There are those who will never forgive me for holding it,” he laments.

Surveys by YouGov, a pollster, confirm that hindsight has tarnished Mr Cameron’s legacy. In August 2016, when he had been out of Downing Street for less than a month and an orderly departure from the EU seemed straightforward, 32% of Britons thought he had done a “great” or “good” job; only 34% gave him poor marks. Today he is Britain’s most disliked politician. According to YouGov, 61% of respondents have a negative opinion of him, compared with just 16% who view him positively. Even Tony Blair, whose reputation was severely damaged by the Iraq war, is disapproved of by only 55% of Britons. Whatever criticisms Mr Cameron levels at ex-colleagues in his book, it seems the public have already decided who is to blame for the mess the country is in.