Morning:
11°c
Twenty years ago this month, the Czechs provided one of the highlights of a historic year when the Velvet Revolution in Prague drove the Communists from power.
Now Prague has shaped the fortunes of Europe rather less entertainingly, but again decisively.
In grudgingly ratifying the Lisbon Treaty yesterday, Vaclav Klaus has caused his spiritual ally David Cameron a Europe-sized headache.
The odd thing about the British Conservative position is that it does not seem to have calculated the consequences of its own stance with any accuracy.
Mr Cameron pledged a referendum but he must surely have known he might well be unable to deliver it. It's no good, really, blaming Tony Blair for his volte face on a promised vote, or the Irish for finally voting "yes", or the Czech courts for being disobliging and declaring the treaty legal.
This was an unambiguous promise: it did not come with small print and a lawyer from the Turks and Caicos.
True, it has been effectively dead since the party conference, when Boris Johnson had the bad manners to ask for a referendum the leadership knew it could not deliver.
But Mr Cameron is spookily like Mr Blair in a tendency to make grand commitments which he then slips out of, citing a change in the weather. He has done it once, for good reason, on reneging on the pledge to match Labour spending.
Today, he will formally declare he cannot deliver a referendum on a Treaty already in force.
As a fellow sceptic, I have some sympathy with his basic position.
He has always opposed the federal instinct in Europe which is anchored deep in this treaty - with its extension of qualified majority voting and widening of the European Court of Justice's jurisdiction.
However, the failure to deliver on a plebiscite leaves a vacuum in New Tory thinking on the EU.
It is defined only by an absence from the main Conservative voting block in Brussels. This looks a rather less arguable position than it did when no one paid much attention to it.
Even discounting the dead-end argument about embarrassing alliances with other European parties, the prospect of life on the naughty step in the EU is easier to contemplate out of No 10 than in it.
I sat next to a senior adviser to Chancellor Angela Merkel recently in Berlin, who twisted his features into a scowl at the mention of the Conservatives' position and concluded sourly: "It is not important because it is unsustainable."
The Conservatives are going full throttle to stop the Blair candidacy for the new role of EU President; but why should they be heeded on this, or anything else, when they do not belong to the mainstream?
The decision to sit outside the European People's Party is seen as a sign of lack of engagement.
"All we know about him," shrugs my German friend, "is that he doesn't want Tony Blair and wants to side with people who oppose Merkel and Sarkozy."
They see him as the new British Mr No. Some Tories delight in this pariah status. Mr Cameron doesn't strike me as that type.
He can argue that his views are in tune with the election's heartfelt lack of interest in institutional Europe.
But the practicalities of leadership dictate that he will have deals to make and alliances to build and it is going to get rather chilly relying on Czechs and Poles for support on questions like financial legislation that could affect the City of London, to name but one upcoming field of conflict.
Anyway, the Tories did not need to renege on their healthy scepticism about the deepening of EU powers.
They could have held their position perfectly coherently inside the main conservative voting block and made clear where they differed from the federalists.
The real reason they chose unsplendid isolation was to appease Eurosceptic opinion in their own ranks - and draw UKIP supporters back into the fold.
A move intended as a tactical ploy is now in danger of dominating their entire strategy (such as it is).
In the dead zone of the TV studios in the early hours of the morning after the European elections in June, I met a senior shadow cabinet figure and commented that he must be pleased at the drubbing of Gordon Brown. "I will be," he said, pointing at the strong UKIP showing, "when most of these f****** come back to us. That's not now."
At a recent private shadow cabinet session on election strategy, the projected margin of victory next year was a mere 40-60 seats. That would make UKIP's performance vitally important to the mandate and authority of a Cameron government. The Eurosceptic tail still wags the Tory dog.
All the personnel-manager skills Mr Cameron possesses have been deployed to massage the problem out of existence.
He made William Hague, the man who gambled an election on the "Save the Pound" campaign shadow foreign secretary and has already confirmed his place in a future cabinet.
Ditto the defence spokesman, Liam Fox, Mr Hague's staunch ally and an equally full-blooded Euroscpetic.
Mr Fox, by the way, desires to succeed Mr Hague in the job if, as senior shadow cabinet sources murmur, he only intends to serve one term as foreign secretary.
So far, Mr Cameron has kept tensions over Europe at arm's length from his leadership. As a result, he has never quite defined his own position. What we know of his approach to foreign affairs is mediated through his love-in with Obama (that looks more ragged now) and views on Afghanistan, which are growing more cogent and better expressed. He has never gone into any detail, however, on how he intends to approach dealing with the EU, beyond the vague sense that he would like to get back some powers which have been ceded to it. That begins to look like impotence when the means are so foggy.
So today, courtesy of the Czech ratification, Mr Cameron has no choice but to correct that. Something finally has to be said that tells how far he will go in his own opposition to the Treaty.
Calls for a referendum will not be dulled, just flourish again in more fractious form. Can he really serve up a minimalist offer of a national vote on individual clauses?
Or will he serve up the kind of compromise Mr Blair would have concocted, by promising to stop something happening in the future which he was unable to prevent in the present? These two get more similar, the more they claim to differ.
I propose instead a new referendum on a question even the most dissatisfied of Conservatives could agree to.
"Do you wish you hadn't started from here?" The most heartfelt tick in the "Yes" box would come from the Tory leader himself.
Reader views (4)
Well as grand dad would have said "never trust the tories" and what applied at the start of the 20th century applies at the start of the 21st!!
Soldiers were promised "Homes fit for Heroes" after WW1 yet those lucky enough to return came back to the same slums!
The sooner people realise the Conservative Party has no relevence in the 21st Century the sooner we will get back a domocracy.
Sorry Anne but Loondoners already suffer from the result of your anti Ken campaign and know the mess Boris is making so we must not be fooled into trusting Dave the Cave!
- Melvyn Windebank, Canvey Island, Essex
I feel violated, angered, and sick that we've been denied this referendum, for if we had been given it Cameron would have had something to put on the table and make his demands more appealing. Now we will have nothing. We could still have a referendum on staying or leaving, mine vote would be the latter. There are many who have never had the chance to vote on the EU they were to young, so maybe they should be given that right like us older ones who voted before. I want out, the sooner the better. For if we don't get out we will become the dumping ground for the EU and we will see all the rubbish coming here they dont want, and there's nothing we can do to stop it but revolt, or like I said hold referendum and let us all decide that's real democracy and the media and papers should be calling for it too if they really beleive in our country. We could do it together, but I've yet to find a paper willing to pick up the mantle, have they all lost their bottle?
- Barbara, West Midlands
David Cameron is doing a good job of letting us know the new Tory policy on the EU, by waffling on as per usual.
A speech composed of "politic Speak" it won't fool me and I guess there are 1000's and 1000's more out there who also will not be fooled either.
I would like to see a strong new Conservative party leader well before the General Election.
BTW I don't trust Brown either.
- Rosieinlondon, London UK
The assumption is that the Tories will be voted in and we do not end up with a hung parliament.
- Frank, Home Counties, England.
