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Except that Cameron buckled under pressure from ERG and put the EU referendum bill in the Tory party manifesto after they threatened to split from the Tories and join UKIP. This would have meant that the Tories could not have mustered a majority ever again.
He sold out the country to save the party.
Alan_tbt-
My (probably naive) take was that Cameron saw a referendum as a lazy way of shutting up the ERG who'd been a right pain in his arse for years. He'd seen the Scots IndyRef, and thought he'd apply the same strategy. He assumed that the country would vote no comfortably (which iirc was consistently the polling), and he could therefore shut the issue (and the likes of Rees-Mogg) down for the duration of his political career, if not longer. Much as I can see how the prospect of getting the Eurosceptic loons to piss off really appealed, the problems were a) he irresponsibly made a bet which the country couldn't afford to lose and b) we lost.
I'm not defending him at all, btw - it was reckless and irresponsible - just offering what my reading of it was at the time.
RecoveryRide
Cameron is a dick, but he throbs a little less than Boris, Truss et al doesn't he?