European elections are normally an afterthought in British politics. As even David Cameron admits, most of us struggle to remember who our MEPs are. Two-thirds of us don’t even bother to vote for them. But this year, the European elections are threatening to dominate politics.
Talk to Tory ministers and MPs about the year ahead, and they all look nervously towards May, because they know that the Conservative party is in real danger of coming third in a nationwide election for the first time in its history.
In and of itself this need not matter too much. The trouble is that a third place finish would send the party into a panic from which it might not recover before the general election. In the aftermath of being beaten by Ukip, there would be demands for an electoral pact with Nigel Farage, for an explicitly ‘outist’ European policy and for a string of more distinctively right-wing policy positions, all of which would drive the Tories away from their central argument: you can’t trust Labour with the economy.
All Tory MPs know that the party’s manifesto for the European elections will have to set out some more detail on his policy of renegotiation followed by a referendum.
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