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The Leave campaigns continue to bicker with each other in increasingly absurd fashion, but it would be wrong to think that everything is going the In campaign’s way. Number 10, as I write in The Sun today, have been taken aback by the sheer scale of the hostility to the deal. There have been some very tense meetings in Downing Street this week.
Cameron himself is, I understand, acutely aware of how volatile the situation is and how quickly the referendum could turn. But those around him are more confident. They believe that they are succeeding in denying the Out campaign the credible, political leadership it needs. They believe that there won’t be any surprising names on the list of Cabinet Ministers who come out for Out.
In Number 10, they are confident that they will get Boris Johnson on side with this proposed sovereignty law. But those who have seen the proposal say that they are not sure that this ‘sovereignty law’ will go down that well. ‘If Boris is looking for a fig leaf, it’s the tiniest fig leaf available. It won’t cover up very much’, I’m told.
Michael Gove is another whose position is not yet certain. It was thought, by Number 10 among others, that Gove had, albeit reluctantly, decided to back In out of personal loyalty to the Prime Minster. But I understand that he is still undecided. ‘‘Precisely split down the middle’, is how it was put to me.
There is, though, one minister who the Cameron circle are now resigned to losing to Out: Priti Patel, the employment minister. In a way, this is not surprising—she has always been a Euroscpetic and once worked for the Referendum Party—but it will be blow to the leadership to see one of the party’s best media performers on the other side of the argument from them. Patel will almost certainly be joined by another four of those who sit round the Cabinet table—Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling, John Whittingdale and Theresa Villiers.
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