David Cameron wants to return to politics. It’s a shame he has so little to offer

The British establishment is a gentlemen’s club that offers lifelong membership: once you’re in, you’re in for life, with a vast array of perks thrown in on the house. David Cameron once said he wanted to be prime minister for lofty, high-minded reasons: “Because I think I’d be good at it.” Unfortunately, he ended up the worst prime minister on their own terms since Lord North, who somewhat clumsily lost the American colonies in the 18th century. Having left the country in its greatest turmoil since the war, after two years dossing around upmarket festivals with “his trotters up”, Cameron is now apparently “bored shitless” and fancies being foreign secretary, in much the same way the less entitled might take up learning how to play the guitar to pass the time. If entitlement sprouted legs, arms, and a face prone to turning crimson when provoked, it would be David Cameron.

There is one small obstacle in the way of his ambition, the whole throwing Britain off a cliff bit aside, which is that he’s no longer an MP. Like Tony Blair before him, whom Cameron privately described as “the master”, the toppled Tory leader thought he was too big for the House of Commons unless he was top dog. “What? Going off to do tedious trivialities such as helping constituents with their problems and giving them a voice in parliament? Do you know who I am? I’ve played ping-pong with Barack Obama, don’t you know!”

It wasn’t always this way: Ted Heath stayed on the backbenches for more than a quarter of a century after he was deposed, even if that was only partly to annoy Margaret Thatcher.

Cameron and his sidekick George Osborne pursued an ideologically driven and disastrous austerity project that is the main cause of this nation’s current ills. It choked off the country’s post-crash recovery and caused the biggest squeeze in wages since the Napoleonic wars. The sacred target they set to justify their project – to eliminate the deficit by 2015 – has now been put off until sometime in the 2020s. As my colleague Polly Toynbee gloriously told Osborne to his face on Newsnight this week, their miserable government inflicted misery on benefits claimants while whipping up hatred against them, all while generously slashing taxes for their rich friends, including the bankers who plunged Britain into crisis in the first place.

If that wasn’t bad enough, Cameron called the EU referendum as a means to resolve an internal fight within the Tory party. It became a vote, in significant part, on immigration – which is unfortunate given he had himself spent years demonising migrants – as well on the broken status quo that delivered decline and stagnation for millions of people, in no small part because of Cameron’s own policies.

It was always about David Cameron, as he confessed in one revealing Freudian slip during the 2015 election campaign, when he told a rally it was a “career-defining … er, country-defining election”.

Men such as him are charlatans who we would never have even heard of if they hadn’t had all the odds stacked in their favour from conception onwards, and who continue to thrive while millions suffer the consequences of their disastrous political careers. Like Osborne, a man with no journalistic experience casually handed a newspaper to edit, or Nick Clegg, who decided that serving five years as an apologist for a wealthy cabal undermining democracy wasn’t enough, and is resuming that service for Facebook. Or like Tony Blair, who helped set the Middle East alight, and now works as a PR agent for murderous dictators, yet is still feted as a statesman by so many in the media. That David Cameron’s entitlement has not been dampened by his calamitous time in office should hardly be a surprise. It is not ability, or talent, or a sense of duty that binds the establishment together: it is entitlement, and little else.

• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist