Tories need their own treaty over Europe

Matthew d'Ancona
05.10.09

It isn't as easy as it looks, is it? As the Conservative conference opens in Manchester today, David Cameron and his team have been given an unwelcome taste of what it is like to experience the full blast of pitiless scrutiny that comes with government - or, in their case, the assumption that you will very soon be in office. And, as ever with the Tory Party, it is Europe that has delivered the slap across the face.

Rarely does Cameron look perturbed, but even his forehead furrowed yesterday morning as the BBC's Andrew Marr pressed him again and again on the EU Lisbon Treaty, approved last week by the Irish people in their second referendum on the subject. We know that the Tories want to give the British people their own vote if the fate of the treaty is undecided when they come to power. But what if the Treaty has been fully ratified by the time Mr Cameron steps across the threshold of Number Ten?

To which Cameron could only say that "you don't want to prejudice or undermine people who currently have said 'we're going through our own ratification process'" - that is, the Czech Republic and Poland, which have yet fully to endorse this benighted Treaty. The idea that the Czechs or Poles would behave differently if Mr Cameron set out in more detail his strategy on Lisbon is either comic or deluded, or both. But it was the best the Conservative leader could come up with.

At lunchtime, it was the turn of Tory chairman Eric Pickles to be cross-examined on his party's Lisbon policy by Jon Sopel on the BBC's Politics Show. Sopel's question was shrewd: did Mr Pickles, in fact, know what his party would do if the Treaty was fully ratified? Pickles, looking like Jabba the Hut caught with his paw in a tin full of Fun Size Mars Bars, repeated the party line again and again, clearly hoping that sheer boredom would wear his interrogator down.

Nor did it help Mr Cameron that Boris Johnson - in action this morning on the conference stage - was reported yesterday to support a referendum on Lisbon even if the Treaty has been ratified. I understand that what the Mayor really wants is a referendum on the whole issue of Britain's membership of the EU. It would be hard, he thinks, to disentangle such a referendum from the Lisbon Treaty. That said, he accepts fully that it is not his decision to take and has assured fellow Tories that he was not trying to upstage Cameron or William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary, on the eve of the party's all-important pre-election conference. Messrs Cameron and Hague, it is safe to say, are not wholly convinced by the Mayor's protestations of innocence.

Let us be clear: the Tory policy on Lisbon is, indeed, a load of old pants. But then so is absolutely everything else connected with this EU Treaty. Cameron and co are inheriting from Gordon Brown a patched-up deal, a European Constitution scandalously repackaged to make it look like something else. Labour's breach of its manifesto promise to hold a referendum on the EU Constitution ranks as one of the most disgraceful acts of dishonesty by any government in living memory.

It would be truly magnificent if the Poles or the Czechs could do what the Irish (asked a second time) declined to do: to consign this wretched constitutional rag bag to oblivion. But let us assume they don't. What then for a new Conservative Government? Does it really seek a retrospective referendum on a Treaty that has already been ratified across Europe and has come into force in 27 countries? Does the Cameron administration truly begin its mission to define the future with a fiddly exhumation of the past? To do so would be to make a fledgling regime look both amateurish and distracted from its economic mission, welfare reform and the rejuvenation of public services, by a quixotic desire to re-enact old battles.

This is the critical point: the Cameron government must indeed confront the European Question and is committed to doing so. But it must do so calmly, strategically and without the slightly unhinged demeanour that has sometimes distanced the Conservatives from the electorate. It is possible to agree with the substance of what someone else is saying but to be put off by their manner. The public has long been broadly in sympathy with the content of Conservative Euroscepticism but unsettled by the form it often took and the extent to which some Tories seemed to talk of nothing else. The opinion polls have always shown Europe to be relatively low on the list of electoral priorities.

Too often in the past, the Conservatives seemed, in the language of 1066 and All That, "Right but Repulsive". Don't forget that Cameron and George Osborne cut their political teeth as Cabinet special advisers watching the Major government disintegrate over Europe and contract into a single issue group, an embarrassing irrelevance at the margins of national life. Never again, they decided. And who can blame them?

As one shadow Cabinet member put it to me yesterday: "The party has to decide whether to jeopardise the gains of the past three and a half years and our chance of getting back by turning this conference into a four-day Eurosceptic rally." His hunch was that the Tory tribe, after a bit of grumbling, would maintain its discipline. I suspect he is right. A referendum is a fine thing but after 12 years in the wilderness a red box is even finer.