On Friday, June 24, 2016, the day after losing the European referendum, David Cameron placed calls to the first ministers of Scotland and Wales, to various EU leaders, and to President Barack Obama. “To each I said the same thing: ‘I had a strategy to keep Britain in the EU. I executed the strategy. It didn’t work. I’m sorry.’”

Of course, many of us think it would have been more accurate to say: “I had a strategy for playing Russian roulette. I executed the strategy. I blew the country’s brains out. I’m sorry.” But this is a prime ministerial memoir — a traditional exercise in self-justification, which in Cameron’s case extends to almost 800 pages — and as such it deploys the device, familiar from