Cameron concedes early Cabinet to Brexit rebels
The PM has backed down on when the next Cabinet meeting should be held and he did so just ahead of a meeting with the Welfare and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith.
Assuming a deal is cut at the European Union summit this Thursday/Friday, David Cameron had hoped to hold out until a week today for the next Cabinet meeting. At that Cabinet meeting ministers who wish to campaign against EU membership would be released from their vows of collective responsibility. Meanwhile, the PM would have been dancing across the nation’s TV screens defending his deal from the early hours of Friday morning or whenever a deal is struck.
Now he will have to compete with Tory opponents vying for TV time, having perhaps only one news cycle entirely to himself. If the Cabinet meeting happened at, say, 5pm on Friday, ministers could be walking out the door and down the street, straight down the road to speak at a Grassroots Out rally due to start at 7pm in Westminster on Friday night.
On Labour’s side, there are also claims of gagging. The former Labour minister and staunch Leave campaigner, Nigel Griffiths, is complaining that local Labour parties are being told by the party general secretary that they shouldn’t near from anti-EU speakers who “advocate(s) cutting employment or social rights …”
Mr Griffiths says he turned up for a pre-arranged debate with a pro-EU Labour MEP at Greenwich Labour Party only to be told that he’d been disinvited because, he believes, the Labour boss had put pressure on the local party. In the end, after a show of hands, he was listened to.
Amongst pro-EU Labour MPs, some are grumbling about a mooted intervention from Jeremy Corbyn attacking the PM’s attempt to reduce benefits for EU workers in the UK. But one out-spoken supporter of EU membership, former shadow Europe minister Pat McFadden, says that he’s relaxed.
“The exam question is ‘in’ or ‘out,'” he says. “The word ‘maybe’ won’t appear on the ballot paper.” Like many others, he thinks the debate will move on from a negotiation that was always more for David Cameron’s internal party audience, to the wider question of membership.
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