Cameron can’t be a victim of populism – the term no longer means anything | Simon Jenkins

Politicians and philosophers, proceed with extreme caution. The political words we all learned in childhood – left, right, liberal, conservative – are turning to dust

Poor David Cameron was defeated, he says, by “populism”. It was not by people who disagreed with him or by his political enemies or those he had offended. It was an evil called populism. What on earth did he mean?

The answer is near meaningless. Populism has become a euphemism for exploiting the people’s will, supposedly by facile...