David Cameron has ghosted Britain over Greensill. At least it's not the first time

Back when David Cameron was a PR for culturicidal London TV franchise Carlton – his sole non-Westminster job before politics – the Guardian’s then media correspondent rang him for a story. Cameron answered his office phone, but clearly decided he didn’t want to speak to her. Consequently, he pretended to be the cleaner. “I can’t prove it was him,” the journalist reflected later, “but it certainly sounded a lot like him.”

Zip forward to the present, and it has now been a full 35 days since the former prime minister first declined to take calls from the Financial Times on the collapse and mushrooming fallout of Greensill, the specialist bank for which he was an active payrolled lobbyist with what he hoped was $60m worth of shares. There was one time Cameron accidentally answered the phone to the FT, then breezed “Do you want to ring my office?” before hanging up. Said office has not cared to answer a single call or text.

David Cameron is still allowed to claim up to £115,000 a year from the public purse, literally to run this office. Surely that’s enough for someone in it to return a call? Seemingly not. Maybe the “office” is just a burner mobile ringing out in a shepherd’s hut. Either way, the firm of which Cameron was a salaried employee – and on whose behalf he lobbied the current government – has now imploded. Furthermore, its administrators have been unable to verify invoices underpinning loans to its top client, steel magnate Sanjeev Gupta, with several companies denying they have ever done business with Gupta. This is becoming quite the shitstorm. And while no one is suggesting the former prime minister is to blame for the shitstorm, he is certainly shitstorm-adjacent.

Watch: Rishi Sunak confirms he 'pushed' to help ex-PM David Cameron with Greensill COVID loan request

For the second time in five years, then, Britain is being ghosted by David Cameron. You’ll recall that having tanked his own Brexit referendum, he promptly retreated into the usual lucrative prime ministerial afterlife, while the rest of us had to endure years of the winners – the winners! – arguing about what they’d won. Even so, this latest silence is a giant piss-take. Come on, former prime minister – we thought we had something. We KNOW you’re still watching our Instagram stories. HELLO? Helloooooooooo? Earth to Call-Me-Dave! Call me, Dave.

While the little people wait by the phone, a quick refresher on billionaire spad Lex Greensill. Simply put, this banker was brought into the heart of government by Cameron and the late cabinet secretary Jeremy Heywood. Greensill’s big idea was to push his supply chain finance on to the state, from which his own company stood to benefit. (This was all part of the Cameron government’s efficiency agenda – and more on that soon.)

Given how absolutely ruthlessly he has avoided answering questions on the matter, I am sure David Cameron won’t mind it being pointed out that this whole supply chain finance business appears to be – technicalese klaxon – a load of bollocks when transplanted to a government setting. The state’s liquidity problems are effectively nonexistent. If government wanted to find a way for suppliers to be paid on time it could have just … paid them on time. Given he died in 2018, it appears we will never know quite why Jeremy Heywood might have thought it beneficial to insert a profit-making private banker into this chain. But simpler and more efficient solutions surely existed.

Then again, all you need to know about the Cameron administration’s “efficiency agenda” is that the “efficiency tsar” himself was Topshop boss Philip Green, who honked: “I’d be bust if I ran my business the way government does.” Yeah, well. SPOILERS. Back then, Green was renowned for holding multimillion-pound birthday parties and running a business whose owner was his wife, a Monaco tax exile. THIS was the guy Cameron chose to write a report into government waste. Green is a man without cultural frame of reference, so didn’t realise the solution he came up with – “centralised procurement” – basically hailed from the 1970s politburo. His other big idea – and you’ll spot the conflict with fellow efficiency spad Lex Greensill – was for the government to sit on invoices and delay payments to contractors.

But if Cameron didn’t spot an alarm-bell-clanging chancer in Green, he should have winced once Greensill started flashing around a business card reading “Lex Greensill – Senior Advisor , Prime Minister’s Office”, complete with government email address and Downing Street landline. As someone who governed by chumocracy, it’s unsurprising to find Cameron’s anonymous friends jumping to his defence. As one of them told the Mail on Sunday: “His attitude is that he had a lot of responsibilities as PM and dealing with the Downing Street stationery wasn’t one of them.” Righto. There’s a pained suggestion this is all unfairly tarnishing his legacy.

In truth, Cameron’s legacy is just miles and miles of tarnish, broken only by equal marriage. That’s it. If he hadn’t successfully ushered in this historic progressive change, there would be nothing in the credit column. Austerity was a failure on its own economic terms, before you even get to the needless misery it wrought. Libya is a failed state. For a remainer such as Cameron, Brexit was clearly a failure. Greensill has now also failed – just an incredible run for a guy whose political catchphrase was: “It was the right thing to do”.

In 2019, Cameron could be found speaking at Saudi Arabia’s “Future Investment Initiative”. This was just a year after the murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which US intelligence agencies concluded was approved by Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. And it was a mere 48 hours after an investment fund whose biggest single investor was the Saudi sovereign wealth fund had agreed to plough another $655m into Greensill ($800m had been forthcoming just a few months earlier). One can only picture the subsequent desert camping trip Greensill and Cameron reportedly took with Prince Mohammed in early 2020. I am imagining Dave’s humorous texts home to his wife Sam – “don’t worry, still in one piece”. “Gotta go – if I’m late to toast marshmallows he’ll crucify me”. If only Cameron would get in touch, even joshingly, with the British public. We are still paying him, after all.

Watch: Labour demands new law on political lobbying after controversy over Cameron's Greensill links

• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist