Charles Moore:

The EU was the future once – but these negotiations show that it’s sliding into the past

‘Authority forgets a dying king.” Before the general election last May, David Cameron ignored the warning contained in Tennyson’s famous line. He announced that, if his party won the election, he would retire before the next one. It did win, and now enemies and colleagues (who, in politics, are often one and the same) sense his waning power.

People will put up with a great deal of play-acting in politics if they think that the master of ceremonies is here to stay. They too can play their parts and bask in the applause. But when they know that this production will quite soon be over, they cast around for the next showman. Besides, as political productions go, EU summits are incompetent farces – court dramas which no one can control, put on by an elite which cannot make sense to a wider audience.

This is Mr Cameron’s domestic political problem about the deal he brought back late last night. There aren’t quite enough people – in the media, in the parliamentary party, in the Cabinet – who any longer see it in their interest to hail his puny gains as a Roman triumph. Mr Cameron no longer secures their future (a fact which, by the way, is bad news for the leadership ambitions of George Osborne).

Everything about this deal – the very idea of trying to get it in the first place, its hyping, its timing, its rush, its pretence to be essential to the referendum, its weak content – arises from two prior assumptions. The first was that the Tory party and the voters needed to be fooled by a charade. The second was there could never be any question of Mr Cameron advocating a Leave vote. So no negotiation could be serious, and no one, on either side, will be able to feel pleased by the result.

At 3pm yesterday afternoon, Downing Street briefed that Mr Cameron would be flying home for a Cabinet meeting at seven. By 4.30, they were re-briefing that the meeting was postponed: Mr Cameron would have dinner in Brussels. By their pretence that this toing and froing could make a difference, they advertised their disarray.

There are many among those sitting at the Cabinet table for their almost unprecedented meeting this weekend who feel like saying to Mr Cameron: “Why are you putting us through all this?” There are some who will refuse to tolerate any more of it. Of these, Michael Gove is intellectually the boldest and, as a loyal long-standing friend of Mr Cameron, the most damaging for him.

From now on, therefore, the internal pains of the Tory party on this subject will be brought into the open. As for us the voters, from today we will no longer have the agenda of the referendum controlled by Mr Cameron. For the expected four months until the vote, his deal will lie on the table for us to look at and ask: “Is that it?”

None of this automatically means that the Leave vote will win. There are arguments, chiefly of fear, for Remain. You have heard them all before – the uneasy mixture of “It’s good to be among friends” and “They’ll be really nasty to us if we leave” – but many will still believe them to be strong. Mr Cameron’s problem is like that of the conjurer who has turned up for the magic show with the hat, but forgotten the rabbit. He chose the deal as the base for his leadership of the Remain campaign, but has not secured that base.

To the extent that the deal tells us anything, it reminds us of things which Leave, not Remain, likes to point out. The row about child benefit, for example, has told voters, who beforehand did not know, that the benefit is paid to foreign residents even if their children are back home in Poland (or wherever). Yet the deal does not reform this abuse.

Again, Mr Cameron said that the deal would excuse Britain from having to pursue “ever-closer union”, claiming “special status”. Yet the Council explicitly states that no deal can change the treaties on this. The treaties contain (and repeat) the devotion to “ever-closer union” in those exact words. All the deal’s wording does is admit that the British do not feel “committed” to further political integration: it still binds us to the law which the treaties impose.

Some of this will certainly be said at the Cabinet. The argument will then widen and deepen.

The deliberate exclusion of serious Euroscepticism from ministerial discourse is now over. How foolish those privately sceptical ministers who have been bullied into supporting Remain will now feel; how vulnerable they will be to their party supporters in the country.

I expect Mr Gove to explain how, in his experience as a minister, he constantly finds that he cannot do his job freely because the EU prevents him – not just its individual views, but its entire legal order. He and others will probably go on to make clear how the House of Commons, who put them in office as a result of a vote by the British people, cannot make the laws its MPs want, and cannot amend the EU laws which they often do not want. Wherever these EU rules reach, the government of our parliamentary democracy is not parliamentary and not democratic. As with the Remain arguments, we know this already, but it will make a difference to hear it directly, as we never normally do, from serving senior ministers.

The rebels’ case will also move on to territory which the “outers” could not colonise when we were last allowed to vote on this subject 40 years ago. It is now an argument for the future.

In 1975, the EEC (as it then was) seemed to be the future and Britain was stuck in a political and economic rust belt. By the time the Berlin wall fell in 1989, Britain had become much richer and stronger, but the postCommunist tide of history seemed to flow with “Europe”. European union and a single currency were seen as the means of making German reunification safe for everyone else. People who warned of the dangers looked as if they had got their fingers jammed in the hinge of history.

How different it would have appeared if the world knew then what it knows today. Sixteen years after the introduction of the euro, its southern members experience high unemployment rates unknown in modern times, and the economies of the zone’s members are geared to the terrifying task of sustaining gasping, dinosaur banks rather than productive citizens.

And who would have credited that Britain, under a Prime Minister who constantly says he wants to reduce immigration, would be accommodating two million EU nationals, including those from the poorest member states such as Romania and Bulgaria increasing at 30 per cent per year? Who would have imagined that hundreds of thousands of the wretched of the earth from outside the Union would be moved hither and thither across its internal borders in a system which is at once too unkind and too lax?

The EU’s structure is from the over-governmental, bureaucratic past and its hope now looks forlorn.