Even though there has been some reeling back today from the suggestion that David Cameron is on the brink of wowing his party with a bit of legislative red meat on an EU referendum, it won’t stop Tory backbenchers trying to force the leadership’s position on this matter.
The problem is that Conservative MPs are starting to see themselves as psychic agents. They vote for something that their party doesn’t want to happen and get called a rebel. A few months later, that rebellion becomes official party policy. One rebel joked to me earlier this week that ‘I don’t rebel against my government, I just vote two or three weeks ahead of it’.
This belief has been forged not just by the fuss that the Tory leadership made over the backbench vote in 2011 in which 81 MPs defied the whip to call for a referendum before adopting the promise as official party policy earlier this year, but by the EU budget revolt, which led to David Cameron getting the cut his MPs had called for in the Commons.
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