What will be left of Cameron’s EU deal?

ITEM by item, David Cameron’s list of demands for reforming Britain’s relationship with the EU appears to be crumbing to dust. First, Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond dismisses calls for Parliament to be given a veto over Brussels law as ‘completely unrealistic’, while confirming that the principle of free movement is not even up for discussion.

As for securing changes to the EU’s governing treaties, he says there’s no hope before the referendum. Instead, we’ll have to make do with some form of ‘bankable promise’ (and we all know how far we can trust our partners’ word!)

So much for the Prime Minister’s initial pledge that he would be pressing for nothing short of ‘full-on treaty change’. Now a senior member of the UK’s negotiating team says Mr Cameron is being forced to retreat even from his modest demand for permission to restrict welfare payments to EU citizens.

As proposed, the idea was to deny tax credits and other in-work benefits to new arrivals for four years, thereby reducing (though not by much) the ‘ pull factor’ luring economic migrants to Britain.

Now we’re told our partners won’t let us withhold the payments for more than a few months – so making nonsense of the Prime Minister’s one and only scheme to cut immigration from eastern Europe.

Of course, it could be that Mr Hammond and our negotiating team are playing the PR game of ‘expectation management’ – encouraging us to expect almost nothing, to make even a minor concession from our partners appear a spectacular triumph.

If so, they underestimate the shrewdness of the British people. When the talks are over, voters will judge for themselves if Mr Cameron has secured anything like the deal he wanted.

The way things are going, even his own finely-honed PR skills won’t be up to the task of convincing us that he’s won.