Cameron faces long battles ahead over issue of Europe

AS JOSEPH Chamberlain put it in 1886 and Harold Wilson is said to have paraphrased in 1964: “In politics, there is no use looking beyond the next fortnight.” And so it has proved for David Cameron. The comeback kid who took his jacket off, loosened his tie and rolled up his sleeves to achieve an outright Conservative victory in May has come up against the grim reality of his own party in June. The Prime Minister may not yet be, like John Major 12 years ago, railing against the Eurosceptic “b******s” in his Cabinet, but you sense the day may not be far off.

It actually began to unravel almost instantly when Mr Cameron personally briefed lobby journalists that he would sack any minister who wanted to campaign to quit the EU. The following day he had to half-deny a story of his own making, insisting he was only demanding Cabinet loyalty during the re-negotiation process.

The trouble for the Prime Minister is that while he may have an unknown quantity of recalcitrants in his Cabinet, he has an abundance on his back benches, some of them formidable former ministers and leadership contenders such as David Davis, who accused Mr Cameron of turning a “decent debate into an acrimonious argument”.

The first shoots of this party division are now flowering, just a month after the General Election, with fights already over the referendum date and the rules for purdah during the final days of that campaign.

Curiously, this newspaper, historically and consistently in favour of EU membership, finds itself siding with the rebels and their SNP supporters in both of these conflicts.

Tory rebels are determined to block Mr Cameron’s frankly absurd notion that there should be no purdah in the final four weeks of the EU referendum. Purdah exists for a reason, to deny the government of the day undue influence during a campaign’s endgame. It is a solid principle that we support.

The EU referendum plans also run up against another frankly absurd notion: that the date of the Euro plebiscite might coincide with next May’s elections for Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast. We are in the middle of a complex debate in Scotland about whether our next Parliament should be of three or five years to avoid a General Election clash, and along comes a blithe suggestion that this same date might be hijacked for the EU referendum.

It’s not only constitutionally disrespectful, it’s also politically muddle-headed given that our First Minister has pencilled in this referendum as her preferred next constitutional crisis on which to justify another independence referendum, and her predecessor, Alex Salmond, now has full rein at Westminster to be supreme mischief-maker.

In the recent staring contest over full fiscal autonomy, the SNP appear to have won with the Conservatives blocking it instead of daring it. Mr Salmond playing fast and loose tactically on the EU issue with Tory rebels is a nightmare for Mr Cameron.