What should worry David Cameron more, Douglas Carswell’s defection to Ukip or reports that as many as 100 Tory MPs could go into the general election pledging to leave the European Union? The former is certainly more dramatic and promises plenty of humiliation over the next few months. But the latter could show the Prime Minister that he doesn’t have as much time on European reform as he would like, and that he is still not trusted by a large contingent of his party.
It is one thing for Better Off Out members such as Mark Reckless to pledge to campaign to leave, no matter what reforms David Cameron manages to secure. But it is much more serious if other MPs decide that there is little point in holding their breath for whatever Cameron can produce by 2017, either because they think voters have already made up their minds and will only reward an Outist MP at the ballot box in 2015, or because they don’t think Cameron will produce anything significant.
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