Clegg and a memory lapse that the Tories won’t let him forget
NICK CLEGG headed to Europe’s most important capital on Thursday morning. He took to Berlin his blueprint for ending the eurozone crisis. Given Germany is key to any solution, one would have imagined Clegg sitting down with David Cameron and William Hague to craft a unified British position.
But it somehow slipped his mind to show the speech to No10 or the Foreign Office before releasing the contents to the media.
Clegg’s unfortunate memory lapse signals a significant deterioration in Coalition relations.
Until now, the wiser heads around Clegg have remembered that there are two issues on which the Liberal Democrats cannot differentiate themselves from the Prime Minister: deficit reduction and foreign policy. A credible country can’t deliver mixed messages to the bond markets or foreign governments.
But this seems to have been forgotten. As a result, Clegg, an emotional pro-European, was freelancing on the most serious political and economic crisis to hit Europe since the end of the Cold War.
WHEN one Tory Cabinet Minister saw Clegg’s speech, he said: ‘The Clegger’s really lost it this time.’ The actions of the Lib Dem leader have put the British Government in distinct danger of being in the absurd position of having two foreign policies.
When No 10 objected to this behaviour, Clegg’s office suggested that not showing them the speech had been an unintentional error. But few Tories are buying this line. As one said to me: ‘Lots of things go wrong in government, but something like this doesn’t happen by accident.’
In an attempt to limit the damage, Clegg’s address is now being described by senior Whitehall sources as ‘very much a personal speech’. There is particular concern about the hectoring tone Clegg adopted. One insider tells me: ‘It was ill-advised. There’s no solution without Germany.’
This episode is another reminder that Europe is the biggest faultline in the Coalition. The problems this causes will only mount as events in the eurozone threaten to overshadow everything else for at least the next year.
David Cameron is now resigned to little progress being made on dealing with the crisis of the single currency until after the Greek elections on June 17.
In Brussels on Wednesday night, at an informal summit of European leaders, Greece was not raised until the very end, and then only in a perfunctory manner.
But the long, meandering talks meant Cameron had to spend the night at a new hotel that markets itself with the rather unappealing slogan ‘Wake up next door to Barroso’, a reference to the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso.
Even a resolution to the crisis could cause problems. Defence Secretary Philip Hammond, widely respected for his financial acumen, warned in Cabinet last week that if the eurozone countries respond to the crisis by pushing ahead with fiscal union, it would be extremely hard to argue that Britain’s relationship with Europe would be unchanged.
Hammond is a Eurosceptic. But he is also a leadership loyalist, which makes his decision to speak up in Cabinet in this way all the more interesting.
For any change in the nature of Britain’s relationship with Europe will lead to calls for a referendum from a large section of the Tory Parliamentary Party.
If these were not enough European problems to be getting on with, No10 is also having to deal with an EU directive designed to increase the amount of biofuels used in petrol, which could drive up prices by another 4p a litre by the end of the decade.
I understand Cameron is ‘acutely aware’ of the issue. The word from Downing Street is they will ‘delay it for as long as we can’.
But this latest interference from Brussels will only harden the mood on the Tory backbenches. Robert Halfon, who has been leading a campaign on fuel prices, complains: ‘This is insanity. How can we get our economy moving again when Brussels keeps inventing new taxes to destroy jobs and growth?’
When Cameron formed a Government with the Liberal Democrats, he hoped that the European issue could be put on hold for five years because he knew what damage it could do to the fragile unity of the Coalition.
But that hope has now been well and truly dashed. Europe is now set to dominate the rest of the Coalition’s time in office.