LONDON — David Cameron, Britain’s former prime minister, is sorry. He is sorry that the Brexit referendum did not turn out the way he wanted. He is sorry that Britain is paralyzed by political dysfunction and that no one seems to know what to do next. He is sorry that people (including, it now seems, the queen) are mad at him.

“I feel sorry about lots of things,” he said in an interview on Thursday.

It has been three years since Britain shocked itself by voting to leave the European Union in a referendum called by Mr. Cameron, three years since his hasty exit from Downing Street and three years since he has spoken publicly about the subject.

And if his detractors in this deeply divided country feel that he has behaved like a character in an action movie who plants a bomb and then walks away from the explosion, his jacket slung jauntily over his shoulder, as fire rages behind him — well, he is sorry about that, too.

Though he does not think that is what happened.

“There was no sense of ‘let someone else deal with this’ — it was really that I felt I wouldn’t be able to do it,” he said, answering the charge that he took an “I broke it, you fix it” approach after the referendum.