In an interview to promote his book, the former PM still says Brexit poll was necessary

Readjusting to being a former prime minister can’t be easy. Tony Blair described having to learn to use a mobile phone, after years when aides took charge of all his communications. Theresa May was to be seen earlier this week pottering about in the palace of Westminster, not a flunky in sight, buying herself lunch.

But the sense from David Cameron’s Times interview is that the hardest readjustment has been getting used to the idea of not always being a winner.

Cameron once reportedly said he wanted to be prime minister, because “I think I’d be good at it”; and when he unexpectedly secured a majority at the 2015 general election, he and George Osborne saw it as confirmation of their political genius.

They were indeed clever, and ruthless – but not ruthless enough, it turned out, when it came to the brutal 2016 referendum campaign, the outcome of which Cameron says made him “depressed”.

Much of his fury is directed at Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, his erstwhile political and personal friends, whom he accuses of behaving “appallingly”.

Ironically, had Cameron’s memoir been published several months ago when it was originally due to appear, these character notes on his old rivals would have seemed of little more than historical interest.

But he has burst out of his shepherd’s hut just as the Vote Leave crew are back together in Downing Street, and applying the same battering-ram approach to parliament, the judiciary and anyone else who stands in their way, as they did to the Stronger In campaigners in 2016.

And the “Tory psychodrama” that he claims prevented the remainers’ message from getting through has become a full-scale civil war, that could yet rend his old party in two.

Yet what Dave doesn’t really seem to feel, is a heavy weight of personal responsibility.

Osborne apparently still chides him, “you and your fucking referendum”.

But Cameron still believes it was necessary and all but inevitable because of the pressures inside his own party and out in the country at large; and that his EU renegotiation was a grand idea that could have been a “boon” for Britain if the leavers’ dastardly tactics hadn’t stopped him from getting his message across to the great British public.

And his analysis of the great rupture of Brexit appears to be that its causes lie more in the political swordsmanship of that brief campaign in the summer of 2016, than in the years of public sector austerity, industrial decline and anti-immigrant rhetoric that preceded it.

It’s much too soon to say, of course – but history may well judge otherwise.