Cameron now has ‘breathing space’
One Tory eurosceptic MP told me that Monday’s statement to the Commons which David Cameron has to deliver looks like turning into a glee club with Mexican waves. But, he said, you shouldn’t misinterpret that.
“David Cameron has won himself a breathing space,” he said – a bit churlish, David Cameron might think. What he meant, he said, was that we had now seen a paradigm shift and “we have the green light to fundamental renegotiation.”
The more you look at the treaty change on the single market that David Cameron was asking for the more it looks like a second if not first cousin of “repatriation of powers.”
It’s certainly trying to change the rules of the game that have been previously agreed. So how did Nick Clegg sign up to that? Well, there was a potential Commons defeat on Europe coming down the tracks. Cameron appears to have told Chancellor Merkel and President Sarkozy that he couldn’t win a ratificiation vote in the House of Commons.
Paradoxes galore here. He’ll get a big cheer on Monday but has been driven by angry backbenchers he didn’t think he could bring round. The insurgent mood on the backbenches this last ten days was not like one of those “spontaneous” riots the Iranian government start up.
More from Channel 4 News: Cameron defends EU veto decision
This was a fire from below and it has achieved quite an impact. By the way, the other ministers who wanted to see David Cameron before he left included Chris Grayling, Theresa Villiers and Gerald Howarth. They never managed to meet up – scheduling problems, they were told. One other point worth mentioning, a phone call between President Obama and David Cameron had been scheduled for yesterday afternoon but that too didn’t happen, for scheduling reasons. We don’t know quite how last night’s Euro-shenanigans went down in Washington but their bigger worry will be whether the eurozone gang looked substanitally more convincing today than they did on Thursday morning. Not sure the US will give them top marks for that.
Quite what David Cameron got in return for wielding the veto isn’t so clear. The eurozone countries and the European institutions seem quite clear that they will be working together so stopping the treaty of the 27 hasn’t halted the potential for the European Commision etc to, in British eyes, have divided loyalties between “ins” and “outs” in the future.
An integration dynamic that has been at work ever since the euro started has been accelerated, surprising as it might seem, by the eurozone crisis. Vetoes have been used in the past to stop integration – de Gaulle in the 1960s ushering in the decade of lost integration as euro true believers remember it. But David Cameron can’t stop integration (only the markets might do that). So where does his veto take him?
It looks to many here in Brussels like a flick of the tail from someone heading for the exit. He’s got his work cut out convincing them otherwise. More immediately, he may need to convince some elements of the financial services industry who use London as a foothold for Europe, some investors in other sectors too, that he is not on a journey from the periphery to the door marked “way out.”
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