What’s next for David Cameron’s tussle with Brussels? The Prime Minister made clear yesterday that ‘we are not paying a sum anything like’ the £1.7 billion demanded by the European Commission last week, and now the focus is on how much he can get the bill reduced by. He will have to pay a bill, but to maintain credibility, the Prime Minister must end up paying something much smaller than the original demand.
Next week George Osborne and other European finance ministers will hold emergency talks on the bill, and today Number 10 set out what the Chancellor plans to say at those talks. A Downing Street spokeswoman said:
‘What we agreed already is the Chancellor and others will be raising with other countries is we need a process to understand how these figures were arrived at and what the methodology is, is it fair? So those are the discussions that we will need to have and the other point is this has all been done on the basis of estimates.’
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