One of the bookcases in my house contains a number of politicians’ memoirs.

They were bought as brand new hardbacks so they take up plenty of space, helping to fill the shelves and make me look well read.

But I didn’t pay full price for them. Some come from bargain bookshop The Works. Others come from Poundland. All cost less than your average magazine.

Whatever it is about the autobiographies of most recent politicians, they all seem to end up being flogged off at bargain prices.

And I guess I’m their target customer. As someone who takes a keen interest in politics and books and can’t resist a bargain, a cut-price political autobiography is right up my street and right onto my bookcase.

These autobiographies aren’t the sort of books ever going to give JK Rowling a run for her money nor trouble the bestseller lists for very long. Few politicians are liked much. Distaste for our elected, or in Boris Johnson’s case unelected, leaders is stronger than ever.

And of course politicians are widely regarded, fairly or unfairly, as liars. Conventional wisdom declares that an author’s first novel is usually disguised autobiography. Given their talent for fiction, politicians’ autobiographies are perhaps disguised novels.

David Cameron’s long-awaited For The Record went on sale yesterday so it won’t be in the bargain basements just yet.

He was paid £800,000 for it, not a great deal when you consider that Tony Blair received a reported £4.6 million for his book, A Journey - though Blair donated the money to the Royal British Legion.

Whether For The Record turns out to be more novel than autobiography won’t become clear until it’s been read and reviewed in its entirety. But according to those who’ve seen it there’s a lot missing.

He says he’s proudest of allowing same-sex marriage. He doesn’t mention other achievements such as the “austerity” that has decimated adult social care and children’s centres, the closed libraries and swimming pools and broken-down parks, the disappearing bus services or the massive growth in food banks.

We aren’t reminded of his early “hug a hoodie” phase or his promise to lead “the greenest government ever”.

“The Big Society”, whatever that meant, doesn’t seem to feature. Nor does he refer to his first speech to the Tory party conference, where he told the party it needed to “stop banging on about Europe”.

As for his worst decision of all, to hold the EU referendum, create the current mess and sow the seeds for the break-up of the UK, he writes that he thinks about the consequences daily and worries “desperately” about what will happen.

I’m sure all the food bank customers, feeling robbed of their futures, and the car and steel workers losing their jobs as firms move out of Britain, feel very sorry for him.

The fact is that the referendum was a short-term measure with catastrophic long-term consequences, and he was either too arrogant or too stupid to see that.

He saw it as way of winning Ukip voters back to the Tories. The AV and Scottish independence referendums had gone his way so he felt sure the EU one would as well.

In any case he thought he would never have to keep the promise to hold it. Either he’d lose the 2015 general election, he reckoned, or he’d end up in another coalition with the Liberal Democrats, who would block it.

When he ended up winning the election he had to go ahead with it. If he had broken the promise, the foreigner-hating, right-wing press and his Europhobe backbenchers would have slaughtered him, and no Ukippers would return to his party.

Surely Cameron could have held the referendum and still held onto his job? When Harold Wilson held a referendum on staying in what was then called the EEC, he allowed cabinet members to campaign on whichever side they wanted but he mostly kept his own head down, so the decision didn’t undermine him.

Cameron had nailed his colours to the remain mast and had to quit when that ship sank. He didn’t learn from history.

Nobody is putting money on the outcome of the next election. The only safe bet is that Scotland will leave the UK in order to rejoin the EU. That’s going to be better remembered as Cameron’s legacy than gay marriage.