Has David Cameron settled on a strategy for dealing with his opponents in the EU referendum? The Prime Minister was clearly caught on the hop by the decisions of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove to back the ‘Out’ side at the weekend, and his angry digs at the Mayor in the Commons on Monday showed that. But later in the week, the Prime Minister tried to patch things up a little by saying that Boris was a ‘great friend’, which suggested an attempt at least at calming things down.
But today in response to Michael Howard’s decision to back Brexit, Cameron said that claims made by those like the former Tory leader (though he didn’t name Howard) that EU leaders might make new concessions in the event of a vote to leave were ‘complete fiction’. This is rather more emollient than his divorce joke that apparently came at Boris’s expense on Monday, but still shows that the Prime Minister isn’t going to treat his opponents with kid gloves.
But Cameron does need to work out a consistent way of responding to his critics that doesn’t help the cause of those who want to use the referendum – whatever the result – as an opportunity to split the party and drive support away from the current establishment candidate, George Osborne, and into the arms of Boris Johnson. His team is already planning the way the party will be brought back together after the referendum using the media, internal party events and potentially Commons clashes like the Trident vote to focus the party back on beating up Labour, rather than one another. But if the Prime Minister comes across as spiteful, then he’s making that planning even more difficult.
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