The Tory party’s gone crazy over Europe, and it’s Cameron’s fault
By Benedict Brogan, Daily Telegraph
// Over the past few days it has, with a troubling degree of deliberation, thrown away the small but growing political advantage it had given itself in recent weeks in order to indulge in another of those interminable arguments about the nature of our relationship with the EU. In the space of a fortnight the Tories have gone from leading a national conversation about Labour’s unsuitability to govern a changing Britain, to staging a public family feud about who emptied the dishwasher last time and where they should go for the holidays.
The result is daily headlines advertising that once again the party is divided. Ignore those who boast that at least this time it’s merely about tactics, not policy. They would like you to conclude that because the Tory party at Westminster favours an in/out referendum, the current spat is a mere bagatelle. They are wrong, in the same way that any Tory politician who justifies attacking the leadership in public in the name of ideological rectitude should not be trusted with the electoral spoons. The party is divided on an issue that scarcely one in 10 voters lists as a priority. The electorate will respond accordingly if this continues.
Some would like to blame the mess on the rag-tag collection of Euro-irreconcilables who exist to make the life of any Tory leader a perpetual misery. After all, was it not their relentless manoeuvring to extract concessions on a referendum and then demand some more that caused all this trouble in the first place? Actually, no. This current episode, which has done so much to make David Cameron look a sap, can be traced back to a Downing Street scheme to head off trouble when the Tories hit the buffers in the local elections. A few days before polling day, the Prime Minister’s office signalled to The Daily Telegraph and elsewhere that Mr Cameron might be ready to bring forward legislation for an in/out referendum in this parliament. He might even, it was hinted, put it to a vote. The reaction was electric. The irreconcilables pounced, and asked for it in writing.
Which, as has happened on countless occasions with this lot, is when the hedging started. Ministers hummed and hemmed. Maybe a Bill, but not a vote. And actually not in this Queen’s Speech. Mr Cameron, it turned out, had no intention of including such a Bill in the Queen’s Speech. In fact, he didn’t even trouble to ask Nick Clegg if he would mind: he assumed the answer would be a flat no, and left it at that. When backbenchers understandably responded by proposing an amendment taking the Government to task, Downing Street first affected insouciance, then tied itself in knots by allowing backbenchers to vote against the Government, and ministers to abstain. His office may be correct on the narrow point – that the vote is meaningless – but that Mr Cameron is unable to ask his Cabinet to vote for the Government against a critical amendment is all too full of meaning about the sorry state of his authority.
Then there was Lord Lawson, who demonstrated that even the party’s greatest can become distracted by their own brilliance. His declaration that it was time to leave the EU was consistent with the intellectual journey he has pursued in public. Yet it also demonstrated the political deafness of the true obsessive who failed to hear the impact of what he said on his leader.
Once he had rolled his hand-grenade – purely in the name of intellectual inquiry, you understand – others joined in, culminating with Mr Gove who, presented with the gentle lob of a hypothetical question, happily answered it: yes, he too would vote to quit. Politicians have few “get out of jail” cards to play in a tricky interview, but declining to answer the hypothetical question is one of them. Why did Mr Gove chose to answer rather than pass?
It may be, as some Tories tried to explain yesterday, that a cunning new strategy is evolving...