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’. But the risk here is that the European Union will, as it has so many times before, simply decide to muddle along without another treaty change. As one critical insider puts it, ‘Are you telling me that anyone wants the Irish to have two separate referendums?’ If there is only one treaty change after all, Cameron will have missed his chance.
But the second and bigger gamble is the assumption that Cameron’s party has sufficient trust in him — and patience — to let his strategy play out. Based on the evidence of Monday morning, there must be real doubts.
When it emerged that the price of British acceptance of Merkel’s proposed treaty change was the repatriation of parts of the working time directive, the Tory benches were disgruntled. Wags were soon saying that ‘never was so much given away by so few’. The Battle of Britain analogy may be overdone but it is indicative of the mood in a large and growing section of the party.
Part of the problem is that No. 10, until very recently, took it as self-evident that Cameron was a Eurosceptic. Little was done to reassure people about his intentions. The result was a mounting suspicion that he’d gone soft in government, that Nick Clegg or the civil service had got to him.
If Cameron’s strategy is to be given the time it needs to succeed, he is going to have to spend a lot of time reassuring people of his Eurosceptic bona fides. The difficulty is that relations between the Prime Minister and his party are already strained.
The indecent haste with which Cameron abandoned his pledge to hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty as soon as it was ratified convinced many that, when it came to Europe, he was not to be trusted. His decision to impose a three-line whip on the recent EU referendum vote in the Commons combined with his refusal to find a proper compromise amendment raised further questions about what he really thinks on the matter. A sign that the discontent goes way beyond 30 to 40 ‘shits’, as the Cameroons call them, is that even his former press secretary George Eustice didn’t vote for the government, because of his concerns that the promises made over Europe were not sincere.
It is not just Cameron who has trust issues with large sections of the party over Europe. Nearly everyone in government who deals with the EU is regarded as suspect. Sceptics complain that the fight has gone out of William Hague, and that George Osborne is now advocating fiscal union among the eurozone members. The Europe Minister, David Lidington, is also being viewed with suspicion. He was a special adviser to Douglas Hurd — a Europhile by the standards of today’s Tory party; and Clegg is understood to have rubber-stamped his appointment, having vetoed that of the more sceptical Mark Francois. Tellingly, the morning after the Tory rebellion on the EU referendum motion, it was the Education Secretary Michael Gove and not one of the ministers who actually runs Europe policy who was sent out to try and calm the party.
But there are hard-headed, even cynical reasons to think the Prime Minister will deliver on renegotiation. Cameron has long understood the emotional and political power of the European question within the Tory party — and he has always known that it is safer to be in front of the issue than behind it. As a candidate in Stafford in 1997, he ignored John Major’s plea ‘not to bind his hands’ over Europe by declaring that he would never vote for Britain to go into the single currency. Three years later, he was selected for the plum seat of Witney after a campaign by Eurosceptics to discredit his main opponent Andrew Mitchell — now the International Development Secretary — as a pro-European. After being elected in 2001, Cameron worked hard to secure a speaking slot at the No campaign rally at Tory conference that year. Then, in 2005, he won the Tory leadership contest in part due to a pledge to withdraw from the European People’s Party. If Cameron sensed the Eurosceptic wind picking up again, his career to date suggests he would want it at his back.
Now, though, there is the added complication of coalition. For Nick Clegg, Europe is his irreducible core. He is one of those rare British politicians who instinctively feels European. It is who he is. It is hard to imagine him going along with a push for an ‘ever looser union’.
But, as the AV vote demonstrated, when Cameron has to choose between the safety of his own position and the coalition, he chooses himself and his party. As soon as it became clear that the Conservative party would not forgive an AV referendum defeat, the word went out that victory was what mattered and hang the coalition. If the government’s policy on Europe began to endanger his leadership then — if past behaviour is any guide — he would move, and decisively so.
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