We can trust Cameron on Europe

07 October 2009

Eurosceptics are not ‘swivel-eyed’ or psychotic, says Daniel Hannan, and it’s only Labour propagandists who think the party is divided on this issue

As the Conservative conference got underway, newspapers led with reports of a right-wing insurgency against David Cameron. For four successive days the story continued: there was, we kept being told, an almighty barney about whether the Conservatives would hold a referendum if the Lisbon Treaty were already in force.

I was nonplussed and, to be honest, slightly miffed. If there really was a Eurosceptic rebellion, why hadn’t anyone told me? More to the point, what exactly was I supposed to be rebelling against? The Irish referendum didn’t seem to me to change anything: Lisbon was still unratified, and might remain so until the British general election. In the meantime, I wanted a British plebiscite, and so did Cameron.

Just in case I had missed something, I phoned some of the flintier Tory souver-ainistes: Philip Davies, Douglas Carswell, Roger Helmer, Bill Cash (‘the most notorious Eurosceptics’, as I heard a BBC correspondent call us this week; you somehow can’t imagine a Beeb presenter talking of ‘the most notorious climate change activists’ or ‘the most notorious anti-death penalty campaigners’ or ‘the most notorious Euro-integrationists’, can you?).

It turned out that we had all independently reached the same conclusion. David Cameron, we felt, was genuinely working for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, and not simply going through the motions. There was, moreover, a reasonable chance that he would succeed. The assumption that Václav Klaus, the vinegary Thatcherite president of the Czech Republic, would roll over to humour the Eurocrats, was more than a little patronising. And if Klaus’s signature was not on the document by the time Prime Minister Cameron came back from Buckingham Palace, there would be an immediate British vote: the requisite legislation had already been drafted.

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