Time to hose down the sceptics – Cameron aide
The hoses are out in No. 10 I was just told as the finishing touches are put to David Cameron‘s statement on Europe.
Nick Clegg was dousing his own rebellious fires on Europe on Marr yesterday. Tories point out that the most Europhile voices seem to belong to the older generation in the Lords – senior Lib Dems say the mood amongst their own MPs is more sanguine, “a generational thing,” one said. Maybe a facet of all this is that those in the Commons brush up against the voters a little more often?
But Europe still makes the Lib Dem heart beat stronger even if it is, in these troubled and fluid times, a passion in search of a strategy. So Nick Clegg’s people are letting it be known Brussels was not the start of a Eurosceptic “push” in Coalition policy.
For David Cameron, the hose should be on water cannon, full-jet setting. His backbenchers will be there at 3.30pm, pikestaffs at the ready, saying “where will you have us follow you into battle next, oh great leader?” They won’t be in the market for a response along the lines of “well we’re in a coalition and we won’t be fighting many battles in the forseeable.”So he needs to convert the goodwill into capital and somehow store it.
Read more: Ten curiosities about David Cameron’s veto
When John Major came back from Maastricht he was hailed by the same (the very same in some cases) pikestaff-wielders for threatening the veto and securing “opt outs.” Within three months, the Danish referendum had begun to turn the mood sour, the beginning of the disintegration of loyalty in the Major years.
David Cameron’s team worries that in the current high-speed world it wouldn’t take even three months for the mood to turn sour. One supporter close to Cameron said: “His political capital with these people was disappearing” and “he would’ve been destroyed if he’d come back with nothing” from Brussels.
Well, on some measures, including the latest one from the deputy prime minister, that’s what he did come back with. The bigger point about Brussels last Friday you could argue is where it leaves the entire Tory strategy on how do you respond to an ever-tightening core in the eurozone (yes, of course, accepting there is a eurozone still going). You could argue, some do, that Brussels last week saw David Cameron road-test a small model version of the Tory strategy to repatriate powers and live in a looser outer ring.
Brussels, you could argue, gave that approach a mighty “V” sign on Friday so what hope for the fleshed out strategy? They seem to prefer the idea of us out rather than semi-detatched?
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