What next for David Cameron?

The youngest ex-Prime Minister in a hundred years might have three decades of public service left in him, but hasn't the public already been served enough?

Call-me-Dave: coming soon to a care home near you?

For a youngish Cameron newly released on the big, wide society and pondering his options, there’s always the stockbrokers, Panmure Gordon. That’s where David’s father Ian was a senior partner. And his grandfather. And his great-grandfather. The family connection, that and being an ex-prime minister, should be enough to get a foot in the door.

They’d have tough questions for him, mind. Promising to “get the deficit down” and in fact getting the deficit up, will sound to a stockbroker's ears suspiciously like “Buy High. Sell Low” and no amount of family goodwill lovingly stashed away in Panama over the generations can make up for a strategy like that. I mean, it’s all right when it’s the public’s money, but clients'?

So what will David Cameron do with the rest of his life? Still a month off his 50th birthday, the youngest ex-Prime Minister since the 19th century, he has also smashed a two 200-year-old record: to be in and out of both the Commons and No 10 in 15 years is the fastest anyone has ever managed it. Even Spencer Perceval took 16 and his historic brevity is widely attributed to having been assassinated on the job.

But surely it won’t be Panmure Gordon for young David. For a chap whose one big idea was to replace the state apparatus with a loosely regulated network of volunteers, the idea of actual, paid work in the private sector must be horrifying. Non-exec directorships, the lucrative, public-speaking network, none of these things will appeal. Brace yourself for two decades worth of giving back. Call-me-Dave: coming soon to a care home near you.

Not straight away, mind. According to “friends” of the former Prime Minister, first on the list is the memoirs. (And these must be close friends, not the here today, gone tomorrow kind you'd make godparents to your children only for them to detonate your career and your place in history, one of whom flew back from California especially to do so, and for no purpose greater than to shift a few copies of the second edition of a self-help book).

Cameron will no doubt hang on to the large sum these memoirs will fetch. Blair might have donated his to the Royal British Legion, but Cameron has, either to his credit or detriment, generated no comparatively obvious benefactor for such overblown gesture politics. There’s the EU budget, but no one like’s a smart-arse. Plus the throwing-dead-cod-back-into-the-sea metaphor would be too obvious for his many detractors to resist.

What he will need is a gimmick. Blair was generous enough to group his magnum opus into defined themes, which did at least make life easy for those who were only interested in not reading a particular chapter, rather than waste time not reading the whole thing.

If it’s not too late for suggestions, I suggest a Pulp Fiction structure would be the way to go. Start at the end, which is of course the only bit anyone cares about, but if they do decide to push on they’ll be rewarded with all the minor characters indulging in a high-octane recrimination bloodbath, some meaningless but immaculately well-shot scenes riding around on a snowmobile in the Arctic circle (“Who’s Ed?” “Ed’s dead baby”) and even The Vow, taken this time not from the Book of Ezekiel but the front of the Daily Record, precipitating a murder attempt our hero frankly had no right to survive, but which came too late for him to change his ways.

As for the rest, Cameron, of course, is not as desperate for cash as his predecessors. Neither his nor his marital family, the Astors no less, have ever been short of a few quid, so advisory roles as global investment banks will not be as urgent as they were for Mr Blair or Mr Major.

Whether Cameron comes good on his various promises of duty and public service we shall have to wait and see. But the public might be of the view that, on balance, it’s already been served enough.