Tories savaging each other over Europe? Surely not

David Cameron called the referendum, we’re led to believe, in order to end Tory in-fighting over Europe. Sadly, of course, Mr Cameron is no longer in the Commons, and so could not take part in yesterday’s extraordinary debate on Brexit.

But I do hope he watched it on TV, to see how well his plan is working out. If so, he will first have witnessed Bernard Jenkin, a Tory Brexiteer, furiously accuse Remainers (including those on his own benches) of speaking “nothing but cant”, and of plotting to “reverse Brexit” – while Remainers shouted, “Rubbish! Absolute rubbish!”

Next, Mr Cameron will have witnessed Ken Clarke, a Tory Remainer, witheringly inform his “desperately paranoid Eurosceptic friends” that he was not “trying in some surreptitious Remainer way to put a spoke in the wheels” of Brexit. In any case, he sniffed, Brexiteers didn’t even “know what ‘Leave’ means”.

While Mr Clarke was deriding his own colleagues, Mr Cameron will no doubt have observed the way Sir Desmond Swayne, a Tory Brexiteer, was glowering at him: arms crossed, lips thin, and eyes smouldering.

After further Tory bickering, Mr Cameron will then have witnessed Marcus Fysh, another Tory Brexiteer, suggest to the Deputy Speaker that Mr Clarke was “misleading the House”, while scandalised Remainers shrieked, “Take that back!” Moments later, Mr Cameron will have witnessed John Baron, another Tory Brexiteer, claim that the “condescending” Mr Clarke wanted the Commons to be no more than a “council chamber of the European Parliament”. This, as Mr Cameron will have seen, earned Mr Baron a scolding from Anna Soubry, a Tory Remainer, while Mr Clarke dismissed him for peddling “scurrilous Right-wing rubbish”.

Possibly from behind his sofa, Mr Cameron will then have watched Dominic Grieve, a Tory Remainer, deplore the failure of Brexiteers to engage in “rational discourse”. He was tired, he said, of being called “a traitor” committing “sabotage”, and found it “startling” that his Tory colleague Iain Duncan Smith had accused him of “grandstanding” (“I don’t remember ever having suggested such a thing about the way he’s expressed his views on Europe”).

Head very likely in hands, Mr Cameron will then have witnessed Mr Jenkin claim that clause nine of the EU Withdrawal Bill “is not about implementing leaving the EU” – only for Tory Remainers to drown him out by shouting, “Yes it is!”, “Read it!” and “Sit down!” Finally, Mr Cameron will have seen Mr Grieve declare that, while Tory Brexiteers were “fixated on getting us out”, their “aim… seems to be to mess it up as much as possible”.

He would, therefore, vote against the Government, and put “the country before my party”. I could be wrong. But my impression, based on these delightful exchanges, is that if the referendum was intended to heal Tory divisions, it hasn’t entirely succeeded.