Europe, the times they are a-changin’

Before writing my column for The Spectator this week I asked one of the most clued-up Eurosceptics on the centre right what opt-outs Britain should push for in any negotiation over an EU treaty change. His answer, to my surprise, was “forget that, we should just leave”.

This answer took me aback because this person had been the embodiment of the view that the European Union could be reformed from within. But people are dropping this view at a rapid rate for reasons that Matthew Parris explained with his typical eloquence in The Times (£) yesterday.

I wrote in The Spectator this week that two Cabinet ministers now favour leaving the EU only to learn soon afterwards that the real number is three. Iain Martin writes that half of all Tory MPs now favour leaving.

What is certain is that an encouragingly large body of Tory opinion wants David Cameron to use the coming years to develop a far looser relationship with Brussels. It seems that the question now isn’t whether Britain will renegotiate its membership of the EU but how she will it do. That is quite a shift.