Cameron’s EPP pledge would not have plagued him if he’d been less evasive

David Cameron had hoped to travel to Prague in secret last week. News that he had entered the final stages of negotiations with his Czech counterparts over the Tories’ future in the European Parliament would only increase expectation of the deal which has eluded him for the last seven months, and heighten the derision if he failed. While his visit did become public knowledge, he returned without the British press scenting what the Lidové Noviny had printed: that he will travel to Strasbourg later this month to form a new alliance of Eurosceptic parties, and finally quit the European Peoples’ Party.

Anything involving an acronym in Brussels usually loses the interest of most Westminster politicians, and it seems that Mr Cameron paid little attention to the detail of leaving the EPP when he first came up with the idea as a leadership contender. The EPP is a group of European centre-right parties, which joined forces for maximum collective clout in the European Parliament. But Tory Eurosceptics have long resented this relationship, saying that the EPP is committed to the federalist project to which Conservatives are implacably opposed. Yet in this choice between influence and principle, successive Tory leaders have chosen the former.

Mr Cameron’s promise to withdraw, made when it was not even certain that he would stay in the leadership race, helped to win the votes of Tory MPs who might otherwise have been put off by his ‘modernising’ plans and his refusal to back grammar schools or cut taxes. For Mr Cameron, the policy of EPP withdrawal is a giant cut of meat thrown to the Eurosceptics to stop them tearing him to pieces as they have done the four previous leaders. As a device in the Cameron campaign, the pledge was a roaring success — but the drawbacks of that pledge are now manifestly, painfully clear.

Leaving the EPP has allowed Mr Cameron to be caricatured by gleeful Labour spin-doctors as abandoning the European political mainstream and limping off to sit beside a ragbag of homophobes, fascists and Robert Kilroy-Silks.