As the effects of last week’s European Council become clear, debate about the rights and
wrongs of David Cameron’s diplomacy hinge on one question: were his demands ‘reasonable and modestly expressed’, as a source in No 10 put it to me?
Everyone knows that there were chronic failures in the run-up to the meeting itself. I laid a few of them out in an earlier post, but, basically, they amount to a failure of prioritisation: the UK eroded the goodwill it needed by fighting tooth-and-nail on every issue beforehand, thereby blocking things that other EU states care about but which are not important, except symbolically, to the British. International — and especially European — cooperation is about give-and-take. It cannot just be take.
But the verdict on the PM’s diplomacy has to be focused on the reasonableness of the British demand in this case.
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