Why David Cameron’s ‘Northern Alliance’ may reshape Europe

If David Cameron were to divide Europe up, he’d make some crude distinctions. There would be the basket cases, like Italy, Spain, Greece, France — examples, by and large, of how countries should not be run. Then there’d be the former Soviet bloc, sceptical about Brussels because they recently escaped a remote, controlling bureaucracy and don’t want to repeat the experience. Then come the good guys, the people with whom he intends to reshape the continent: the Germans, the Dutch and the Scandis. This is the group that the Prime Minister has started referring to as his ‘Northern Alliance’.

Mr Cameron has, until now, had little interest in the machinations of the European Union. To him, politics is primarily social — so he makes alliances by making friends. When François Hollande turned up for a visit, he was taken down to the pub and served a ploughman’s lunch. Angela Merkel, by contrast, is being treated like a homecoming empress. Plans for her visit included an address to both Houses of Parliament, lunch at 10 Downing Street and an audience with the Queen at Buckingham Palace. This pageantry is all the more surprising given the fact that Cameron doesn’t have any favours to ask — at least, not now. He’s buttering her up for the big one, when he wants to change the terms of Britain’s EU membership and have the result of his efforts put to the country in a referendum.

What might Cameron want then? He has yet to say, which makes it difficult for the Germans to support him. This is where Mark Rutte, the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, comes in. Cameron has known him for years, and once bent the Commons’ rules by giving him lunch in a dining room reserved for MPs. For an enthusiastic Anglophile like Rutte, such gestures are much appreciated.