David Cameron is back and it's the last act of a dying government

Politics has a habit of playing with your emotions.

One minute you are celebrating the demise of the most divisive and damaging cabinet minister of this country's modern history. Then, mere minutes later, you are staring agog at the television screen as a former Prime Minister, who inflicted chaos and misery on the country, is proudly sashaying along Downing Street, on his way to take up one of the great offices of state.

Let's start with the good news first.

I have run out of the vocabulary needed to accurately encapsulate the cruelty of the outgoing Home Secretary. Time and time again Suella Braverman would target the most vulnerable members of our society with calculated language that she knew would stir up hatred towards those least able to defend themselves.

From revealing that her 'dream' was to deport desperate people to Rwanda, to suggesting that people forced to live in tents on the streets were doing so as part of a 'lifestyle choice' - she seemed to be intent on causing those with the least the most hassle with her unspeakably divisive rhetoric.

We saw the influence that such language can have this weekend when far right thugs, emboldened by the Home Secretary's malevolent messaging, arrived in the capital, intent on spreading hatred and fear.

Liz Truss did enormous damage to this country in her few short weeks in Downing Street, perhaps her only decent move was to force Braverman out as Home Secretary over a security breach. It is to Rishi Sunak's eternal shame that he appointed her back into that crucial role just six days later, and that he allowed her to remain there, sowing chaos and division for so long.

Now, where do we even begin with Mr Cameron, our new Foreign Secretary (yes, I had to read that back as well).

What does it say about the condition of a government that it must turn to a former Prime Minister, who retired as a Member of Parliament seven years ago into one of the top offices of state in the land? What does it say about the Conservative Party more widely that the Rishi Sunak felt none of his 350 elected MPs were up to the job? And what does it say about Mr Sunak himself?

In the case of all three, the answers lie somewhere on the road towards political oblivion.

I won't be the only one who feels there is something horribly undemocratic about an unelected figure like Cameron being parachuted into this vital position via the House of Lords - purely because a flailing Prime Minister has run out of options. Yes it has been done before, but that doesn't make it right.

Then we come on to Cameron's record. It was his political gamble that spectacularly backfired to leave the country in a state of Brexit-inspired chaos for years, the ramifications we are still dealing with today.

And once he had quickly disappeared from the political stage, keen to avoid the disarray he had unleashed, he went on to become wrapped up in a lobbying scandal over his time working for the now collapsed firm Greensill Capital.

But it is Cameron's record in the post of Prime Minister that we should really take heed of as he once again returns to frontline politics.

When we look around the country today to see every aspect of our public services in crisis, it is he that should shoulder much of the blame.

During his time in Number 10, Cameron - along with his political ally George Osborne - relentlessly argued that enormous cuts to public spending would lead to economic growth. Of course in reality, the opposite occured.

Here in Merseyside we continue to feel the dreadful impacts of the austerity agenda that he championed. We have foodbanks in every community, desperately trying to keep up with the soaring number of people who can no longer afford the basics in life.

We have a homelessness crisis threatening to overwhelm our local councils, which have seen their central government funding slashed to the tune of hundreds of millions of pounds and like much of the country, we have NHS hospitals boasting record waiting lists where staff are run off their feet trying to offer the basic level of care to those coming through their doors.

What really stings about the damage inflicted by Cameron's austerity agenda is how it focussed on the areas that actually needed the most help.

It was this nation's most deprived areas - including many here on Merseyside - that were hit the hardest.

On average, the top 10% of poorest councils in England - of which Liverpool and Knowsley are a part - have received a 28.3% cut in the last 13 years, since the Cameron-led government was elected in 2010. In that same time period, the top 10% of richest councils have received a 10.1% cut on average .

Cameron and Osborne created a country in which nothing works, in which we have stopped believing that our public services will work for us and in which the inequality chasm has widened at warp speed.

Bringing the architect of this destruction back into the heart of government is a truly desperate move from a floundering Prime Minister who knows he has now completely run out of road.

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