Downing Street’s negotiating team returned from Berlin last Friday afternoon in good spirits. Angela Merkel had accepted that Britain deserved concessions as part of Germany’s plan for a new European treaty. The Prime Minister was delighted, believing this to be a significant moment.
This was a first step in David Cameron’s long-term plan: to refashion Britain’s membership of the European Union, but to do so gradually rather than in one big-bang moment. This strategy, however, is based on two huge gambles. If Cameron has miscalculated, his political career will end in failure.
The first is that he has started steadily carving powers away from Brussels, and will have further opportunities to do so. Both the Foreign Office and No. 10 are confident that the German plan to put the stability and growth pact on a legal footing will be the first in a long line of negotiations.
They believe that an almighty showdown lies ahead: the need for a greater level of political and fiscal harmony between the eurozone and the Bundesverfassungsgericht, the German Federal Constitutional Court means that there will have to be a comprehensive treaty change in the next few years.
A broader treaty change, they reason, would be the right moment to push for a new form of membership: what senior Tories have taken to calling ‘ever looser union’.
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