“Britain remains a full member of the EU, and the events of the last week do nothing to change that.”
So said David Cameron during his statement to the House of Commons on the EU treaty veto, although listening to the gleeful reaction of the Tory backbenches, you could be forgiven for assuming that he’d told the EU where to go and torched it on his way out for good measure.
Despite a rumoured instruction from the whips to avoid looking “too jubilant”, backbencher after backbencher rose to congratulate Cameron on his actions in Brussels. With the collection of Tory old-timers the Speaker called, it was a bit like a reunion for Tory eurosceptics from the 1980s.
The prime minister’s statement was delivered with a sense of urgency and authority to match the terms he was using to describe his trip to Brussels. “I went to Brussels with one objective – to protect Britain’s national interests,” he declared to huge cheers from the backbenches.
“We went seeking a deal, in genuine good faith,” he continued. “We were genuinely seeking to reach an agreement with the necessary safeguards for Britain.”
But throughout all this, where was Nick Clegg? The deputy prime minister failed to make an appearance on the frontbench to support the PM, apparently because he feared his presence would be “a distraction” after his dissenting comments in yesterday’s newspapers. Judging by the volume of the cries of “ou est Clegg?” from the Labour side of the house, his absence was pretty distracting in itself.
Ed Miliband put in a strong performance in his response to the PM’s statement – one of his strongest Chamber appearances of the past few months – by painting Cameron as the man who had walked away from the table as Europe tries to solve its problems. He said:
“It’s not a veto when the thing you wanted to happen goes ahead without you. That’s called losing.”
But – and it’s a large but – Cameron easily undermined Miliband’s carefully-constructed arguments by asking what he would have done, had Labour been in power. The trouble with Labour’s response to this entire issue is that it isn’t yet clear what Prime Minister Miliband’s actions would have been.
Whatever your politics, you have to agree that David Cameron is in a difficult position – on the one hand, as a statesman, he must seek to exert Britain’s influence wherever he can, on the other, as Conservative Party leader, he needs to appear to keep Europe at arm’s length for the sake of his more eurosceptic backbenchers. This statement reflected that binary dilemma. One second he was roaring about protecting our national interest, the next he was declaring that “we are in the European Union and that’s where we want to be”.
The jeering roar his backbenchers produced at this would suggest that they definitely don’t agree with him, though.
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