David Cameron couldn’t even trust himself, it’s no wonder the public eventually decided not to trust him.

When a Prime Minister leaves office mid-term, it is a time for reflection. I would like to say David Cameron leaves with his head held high and a wonderful legacy behind him. But he simply doesn’t.

Cameron was one of the most bland and mediocre Prime Ministers the country has ever had, and when history reflects on his six years in power, the word ‘mediocre’ will be generous.

The most positive legacy David Cameron could have ever had was that of a steady hand, totally risk-averse but completely media-savvy, and a guru when it comes to winning elections. In the end, even that was a legacy he failed to cling onto.

Where just about every other Prime Minister used their time in power to implement their vision for the country, Cameron saw coming to power and retaining it as the be all and end all. Vision for the country? Best ask advisers that one.

He was the ultimate conservative with a small ‘c’, wanting to avoid changing anything and happy to continue the Blairite model for the nation which preceded him, while somehow getting the media to eat up all his soundbites about being a radical reformer.

Historian David Starkey probably summed things up best when he said: “[His legacy] is as nothing. The only serious achievement of the government is gay marriage. That seems to be an appropriately frivolous touch of confetti on the whole thing.”

Nothing could sum up the Cameron-Osborne way of policy-making better than the gay marriage legislation. You take something that is relatively uncontroversial that the previous government simply didn’t get around to implementing. Then you grab it by the horns, push it through parliament and paint it as a courageous move.

That’s not to belittle the importance of same-sex marriage legislation to gay and lesbian people, but it was hardly Thatcher and the Miners’ Strike.

David Cameron may still succeed in being painted as what he claimed to be from the very beginning – the ‘heir to Blair’ – but even that would be completely inaccurate. A copycat is not an heir.

New Labour was a project that had never been attempted before and Tony Blair was a man who wanted to be remembered in a hundred years as a great leader and a father figure for centre-left parties not just in Britain, but all over the world.

It was this vanity and blind ambition that caused him to destroy his legacy in Iraq. He wanted to be the hero and he wanted Britain to go out and save the globe. Everything he did was fuelled by an extremely optimistic worldview which he always tried to project onto the country.

(None of this is to say that Blair was fantastic. If anything I’d more say it points to him being a narcissist who dragged Britain along with his own delusions.)

Everything David Cameron did on the other hand, was fuelled by pessimism. His whole Tory modernisation was fuelled by looking enviously at New Labour’s electoral success and thinking ‘if you can’t beat em, join em’.

Whenever he fought an election, he didn’t try to build a warm relationship with the public, he just presented himself as the voice of stability. And he didn’t even have faith in himself to do that properly, preferring to trudge out expert after expert to tell the country how terrible things would be if it voted for any change to the status quo.

After pushing hard as leader of the opposition for debates at election time, he then decided as Prime Minister that he couldn’t trust himself to even beat Ed Miliband in a debate during the 2015 general election, let alone Boris Johnson in the EU referendum.

Finally, and worst of all, he couldn’t trust himself to see off the threat of UKIP, a party who had no MPs when he called the EU referendum and only have one now.

It was typical of Cameron’s pessimistic and short-termist thinking that in 2013 he failed to show strong leadership, put the pro-EU case to the public in a constructive manner and explain that a referendum was not a priority. He had to give into populism, kick the problem into the long grass and hope he would never have to call the referendum he promised.

Fittingly, the only major change David Cameron has introduced as Prime Minister is the one he wanted to avoid at all costs.

Tony Blair’s legacy was shattered because he thought he was God himself and the fate of the entire planet should be entrusted to him. David Cameron’s legacy was shattered for the opposite reason, he could barely even trust himself to get dressed in the morning.