Mrs May wriggles in her EU straitjacket

THERESA May yesterday offered an admirably calm, clear and honest critique of the arguments for remaining in the European Union. Unlike David Cameron and George Osborne, she refrained from issuing apocalyptic warnings that the sky will fall in if we vote to leave.

Instead Mrs May quite rightly dismissed as ‘nonsense’ the suggestion that this country is too small to survive unshackled from Brussels. The Home Secretary also made a convincing case for Britain to pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights – even though this put her at odds with Downing Street and Justice Secretary Michael Gove, who plan a new British Bill of Rights that requires us to remain a signatory to the Convention.

By insisting ‘we need to be smarter’ about how we start changing the many aspects of Europe with which we disagree, she gave a welcome indication that she reckons the renegotiation of Britain’s EU membership terms trumpeted by the Prime Minister was lamentably inadequate. What an enormous pity Mrs May did not follow the logic of these elements in her speech and join the Leave campaign.

For while she conceded that ‘ free movement rules mean it is harder to control the volume of European immigration’, which is ‘clearly no good thing’, she is prevented by her backing for the Remain campaign from fully acknowledging the profoundly alarming magnitude of this problem.

As Mr Gove yesterday observed, mass migration poses ‘a direct and serious threat to our public services’, and ‘we cannot guarantee the same access people currently enjoy to healthcare and housing if these trends continue’.

At the weekend, as we pointed out in this column, Mrs May stood accused of being muddled in her analysis of the migration crisis.

Yesterday, the cause of that muddle became clearer. Isn’t our admirable Home Secretary an instinctive Eurosceptic struggling uncomfortably in the straitjacket of the Remain campaign?