Downing Street is doing its best to spin national parliament’s right to use a ‘red card’ against EU laws – apparently won as part of the PM’s renegotiation with Donald Tusk – as a victory. But others are less impressed. David Cameron’s old friend Boris Johnson has been on LBC this morning talking about the EU renegotiation package. The London mayor, no stranger to being a thorn in the PM’s side, tried hard to appear convincing in backing Cameron.
He said:
‘David Cameron has done a very good job at huge speed of getting a difficult package of measures.’
But Boris went on to say that what was on the table so far was not enough – and that more needed to be done.
Speaking to LBC’s Nick Ferrari, he added:
‘Everybody would want to see more progress, let’s see where we get. So far he (the PM) has been doing a very, very good job of getting people to see things his own way but I think there is much, much more that needs to be done.’
And when asked specifically about the ‘red card’ – which would allow MPs to block EU laws if parliaments representing 55 percent of the EU’s population sided with the UK – he did not seem impressed.
He said:
‘We’ll have to see how it is explained to us, I haven’t yet got a firm view on it. I think what would be better is if we had a break of our own that we were more willing to use and that we were more willing to say Britain is an independent sovereign country and we want to stop it and that’s what we should be able to do.’
Boris didn’t go so far as to openly condemn the terms of the negotiations, though his faint praise of the draft reforms came close to doing that. It seems that even on crunch day for the PM, he can count on old friends to dampen his spirits.
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