Only by showing his distaste for the EU can the PM convince us to stay
A paradox lies at the heart of Mr Cameron’s strategy to persuade voters to support his new deal
In the run-up to May 7, few had a good word to say for Lynton Crosby, the political strategist who was running the Conservatives’ election campaign. Then David Cameron, aided by Mr Crosby’s advice, won an overall majority. Now everyone wants Lynton. Yesterday, it was revealed that he had turned down £2 million to advise the “Leave.eu” campaign just launched by the Ukip backer Arron Banks and Nigel Farage.
Obviously Mr Crosby is constrained by not wanting to upset his recent boss. But I suspect we have not heard the last of him on the matter of Europe. Like the great majority of his fellowcountrymen – he is an Australian – he sees nothing odd about being a medium-sized nation which governs itself, makes its own trade agreements and tries to maximise the global reach of the Commonwealth. If he enters the referendum fray, it will surely be on the Leave side, late in the day when he can see what the shape of that side is.
At present, small gains are being made for the Leave side – the change of the question from Yes/No to Stay/ Leave; the reinstatement of “purdah” so that the Government cannot make proEuropean moves during the campaign; the Conservative Party board’s recent decision to stay neutral and share data with both sides. But there is an unseemly contest for who should run the Leave campaign when it is “officially designated” by the Electoral Commission – a role which no political party will be granted. That is why Mr Farage yesterday proclaimed that the referendum now matters more to him than his party: only by rising above Ukip can he take control. In a fortnight or so, a wider-based Leave campaign, with more than 120 MPs from four parties, Business for Britain, and the practised referendum campaigning skills of Matthew Elliott and Dominic Cummings, will launch. Most likely, it will vanquish Mr Farage for the official designation.
It might be useful to apply a Crosbystyle analysis to this complicated picture. Despite being called the Wizard of Oz, he eschews magic. His campaign method is simple. He identifies the key strengths and weaknesses of each side, the nature of the undecided voters, and the balance in their minds between hope and fear. Then he works out the most important messages, and sharpens and repeats them, brushing almost everything else aside.
In many ways, this EU referendum is like that of 1975. In both cases, a prime minister without strong views tries to calm down a disunited party by throwing the question to the voters. The prime minister devises a “renegotiation” which, he hopes, will allay anxieties. The establishment is overwhelmingly in favour of staying in.
From which it ought to follow that the Remain side will win again. The BBC, the Financial Times, the Civil Service, the universities, most of the largest companies and trade unions, the judiciary, the Archbishop of Canterbury will all (some covertly) campaign to stay in. The EU itself will pour indirect money into making a Remain vote more likely.
The balance of hope and fear, however, has changed. The great moral advantage for the pro-Europeans 40 years ago was that they represented hope, whereas the No campaign drew on fear. It felt like the 21st century versus 1940. The future defeated the past.
Now that we live in the 21st century, the shocks of the euro and mass migration, and the marked decline of European world competitiveness, have ensured that the EU does not feel like the future any more. The argument for British membership is now almost wholly a status quo one – that getting out is too risky. No sane British proEuropean publicly campaigns for much more Europe (although that is what many of them privately want): that side has lost its visionary power.
If it gets it right, the Leave campaign can annex both hope and fear – hope that we could be freer to govern ourselves and be freer actors in the wider world where the global future is actually being decided; fear that if we stay in we shall be more regulated, more dragged into the deeper Europroject and more vulnerable to uncontrollable immigration.
Add the fact that voters are much less respectful and more insurgent than they were in 1975, and a Crosby-ish calculation of the outcome becomes much narrower now than then. Recent polls tend to bear this out. The pull of aspiration among the undecided is away from the EU, while that of security is still for remaining. A typical formulation of such a voter might be “I want my country back, but not if it means I lose my job”.
Almost everything now depends on Mr Cameron. The astonishing collapse of other major centre-ground politicians – the entire leadership of the Liberal Democrat party, every wellknown Blairite, the Tory Europhiles – leaves him almost alone on the field, with Jeremy Corbyn possibly more embarrassing as an ally than an opponent. It is hard to imagine him outflanked by prominent Remain supporters in his own party, and easy to see them (eg Boris Johnson) coming at him from the other side.
The paradox is that only by convincing voters how eurosceptic he is can Mr Cameron persuade them to stay in. It’s too late to say, “Actually, everything’s fine in Europe. What’s the fuss about?” He has to say, “Yes, it’s pretty dreadful, but my negotiating skills have made it safe. We have a great new deal.” If he pulls this off, he takes the last, best trick of the Remain side – the trick any Crosby strategy always seeks – which is to make the other lot look unreasonable.
This is what he is trying to do. The dominant agenda in the EU at present is set by something called the Five Presidents’ report (yes, it is indeed shocking that there are no fewer than five different EU institutions which require presidents). Its aim – like that of Jacques Delors’s report on economic and monetary union in the late Eighties – is massive treaty change.
The crisis of the euro will be “solved” by permitting much more banking, fiscal and political integration, creating the United States of Europe of which many Europhiles have so long dreamed. Mr Cameron’s tactic seems likely to be to seek opt-outs from such a process. Words will be found by which Britain does not have to accept “ever closer union”, but is offered a form of associate status – membership without voting rights, rather than new freedoms for Britain. These he would trumpet as gains, trying to make critics look churlish.
It could just work politically, but the risk is high because trust is low. The tactic so far is to keep every card close and work out in private a special British deal among European leaders rather than lead a public mission from the people of Britain to reform the EU and gain new rights. It does not feel good enough. This is the most important sequence of events in which this Government will engage, yet I doubt if you will hear it get much more than passing mention on the platform in Manchester the week after next.