Downing Street is more confident than it has ever been that the EU referendum will be won. It is not just Barack Obama’s full-throated warning against Brexit that is responsible for this, but—as I say in my Sun column this morning—the sense that they have got the argument back onto their home turf of the economy. Indeed, it was striking how much Obama talked yesterday about the economic benefits to Britain of EU membership and the single market. The fact that this was his main message, rather than Western unity against Putin and Islamic State, shows which argument Number 10 thinks is working.
The truth is that however spurious George Osborne’s claim that households would be £4,300 worse off if Britain left the EU is, it has cut through—as even senior members of the Leave campaign admit. They are braced for the polls moving against them in the coming days,
Despite all its confidence Number 10 is still trying to knobble the TV debates. They think they can do this because, in the words of one government source, ‘if you don’t have Cameron or Osborne, the interest goes massively down’. Those close to the negotiations suspect that what Number 10 wants is to engineer a situation where these town hall style events are Cameron / Farage. They know that this match up will favour them.
But Cameron / Farage would be absurd: the UKIP leader isn’t even part of the official Out campaign. In a democracy, the government should not get to pick who its opponents are.
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