Cameron’s legacy is secure – he’s the man who sold millennials down the river | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

Oh, Dave, you were doing so well at pretending you didn’t exist. As Britain set about the political catastrophe of beginning its EU exit process, Cameron had almost got away with the tactic of keeping his pink, smug head down, as indeed he has been doing since he resigned in the aftermath of the referendum.

At the time, Britons scoffed at the arrogance of a man who could take a risk on fundamental constitutional change with far-reaching consequences for millions of people, on the basis of settling the internal divisions in his own party – and who then, having lost, could casually wash his hands of the whole disaster.

Such complacency, many of us thought, was entirely in line with the man’s whole shtick – an egotistical public schoolboy encased in shiny PR guff, a man incapable of contemplating the possibility that he might ever be wrong, gambling the fortunes of an entire country before coolly walking away from the ensuing fiasco literally humming.

Spameron’s Teflon arrogance is largely the reason that he is now back, defending his decision to call the EU referendum. “I was right to hold the referendum because the issue had been poisoning British politics for years,” he said on Wednesday (for “British politics” read “a Conservative party over which I feared losing control, and which was in the process of haemorrhaging votes to Ukip”).

Men such as Cameron cannot bear their legacies unfolding in ways that do not correspond to their own ideas of themselves. Blair is the same. Both will go down in history for their botching of one issue alone: the former Brexit, the latter Iraq. And they hate this so much that they feel compelled to pop up at regular intervals to insist they were right when it is just the moment when they should be piping down.

Everyone remembers that kid at school who would spend most of the class monopolising the teacher’s attention only to ask one last protracted question just as the bell is ringing, which is naturally met by a collective groan because, guess what: it’s time to move on. We have other lessons to be learned, new hate figures to focus on (May, Farage, Fox, Davis, Johnson, even the tedious Hammond), other peas to shoot. Just go, Dave.

Of course, he will not be forgotten. I have spent more than half my adult life disliking David Cameron, and I’m not about to waste the energy and commitment that that has entailed; and neither, I suspect, are many of the rest of my generation. After all, it is our futures and our children’s futures that he gambled with, and the majority of us had no desire to leave the European Union.

Forgive my indelicacy, but unless our scientists somehow miraculously discover how to halt the ageing process, despite a lack of EU funding or co-operation with their fleeing European colleagues, within 10 years, many of those who voted for Brexit will either be dead or in care homes that millennials will be subsidising, probably in a deregulated, privatised environment in thrall to US corporate interests and hostile to workers’ rights. That’s if care homes even exist.

So Cameron has no need to worry. He will never fade entirely into obscurity. Just as Thatcher cast a long shadow over my parents’ generation, so he will be remembered as the guy who sold younger people down the river in order to scratch a political itch. You only get to live your 20s and 30s once – and he has royally ballsed ours up.

Sure, a politician actually keeping a manifesto promise is always novel, but his reasons for doing so were entirely craven. And if he must insist on a fuller legacy than Brexit, we will be happy to provide him with one. There are the austerity measures that created a stagnant economy, destroyed public services, impoverished millions and partly created the mess we are in today by motivating disempowered people who were suffering to give the establishment a kicking. There’s the bedroom tax, and the tormenting and demonisation of disabled people. Tuition fees, an NHS and social care system at breaking point, a housing crisis of epic proportions, a rise in homelessness. Libya wasn’t great either.

Not to mention that our kids might grow up not knowing what a library is, women who are being beaten by their partners now having precious few places to turn for refuge, over 1 million Britons having to feed themselves from food banks, and socks and newspapers being used by girls who are missing school because they can’t afford proper sanitary towels. Could this be the man who truly hated Britain? And isn’t it time that he shut up?