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Funnily enough, David Cameron’s EU deal hasn’t gone down all that well with voters. The Times this morning gives the ‘Out’ campaign a nine-point lead, up from four points last week. The YouGov poll puts Leave on 45 per cent, Remain on 36 per cent and 19 per cent on don’t know or won’t vote.
This is an entirely predictable reaction to a deal that has genuinely astonished some MPs with its lack of anything that could come close to looking like a fundamental recasting of Britain’s relationship with Europe. The press has savaged it and while all hell hasn’t broken loose yet in Westminster, few Tories bothered to praise the deal as a success.
But David Cameron will know that much of the proper referendum campaign won’t actually focus on the modest changes he has secured. Instead, it will be about the benefits and risks of each option.
And this is why the Leave camps, which continue to make the news for their arguments, may struggle to maintain that nine point lead. They cannot agree on their model of Brexit, but that is currently being superseded by a continuing row about who is in charge and who is behaving badly. Unless these disputes are resolved, the eurosceptics are going to struggle to do what is even trickier than renegotiating Britain’s relationship with Europe. They want to persuade Brits to back a major change by reassuring them that it wouldn’t be a rocky road fraught with risk. To do this, they need to get off their own rocky road fraught with rivalries.
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