PM’s priority is controlling our borders

UNTIL last week, David Cameron was cruising towards a more or less inevitable endorsement of Britain’s continued EU membership. Polls showed a steady majority for staying in, and it was hard to see any force that could alter that.

But the growing crisis over migration has changed things completely. True, there were other problems, from Tory backbenchers demanding greater fairness in the vote, to Labour’s newly ambiguous position following the rise of Jeremy Corbyn.

But the European issue only really connects with the British public mind when it is clearly linked with immigration.

Abstract concepts such as sovereignty do not swing votes. But the idea that we no longer control our own borders is fierce, urgent and easily understood. And The Mail on Sunday’s Survation poll shows that opinion has already swung strongly towards an exit – the first majority for departure for a long time.

Mr Cameron now knows that he can lose this vote in an afternoon, if he plays his cards badly in his dealings with Germany’s Angela Merkel and the other EU leaders. He may even be wishing that he had taken the advice of the increasingly assertive Chancellor, George Osborne, who (as we learned from Anthony Seldon’s revelations), opposed having a referendum at all.

As it happens, Mr Cameron may well be helped by the self-righteous posturing of the Left, whose enthusiasm for welcoming large numbers of migrants is definitely not shared by the British public.

Mr Cameron, though he is on his party’s liberal wing and cannot be accused of lacking compassion, plainly takes a more practical position, and high-pitched, moralising attacks on him will do him nothing but good.

But the real hard work will have to be done in the corridors of Brussels, where the bullying and sanctimonious attitudes of some EU leaders will only serve to convince British voters that they are better off out of an organisation which has so little sympathy for their concerns.

Mr Cameron will no doubt explain to such leaders that, if this is what they want, then it is what they will get, but if they have any sense they will abandon plans to force quotas on member states.

Just as important, the EU must act to secure its eastern and southern borders, to help Syria’s immediate neighbours to cope with genuine refugees, and to re-establish an orderly and just system for sorting those genuine refugees from economic migrants.

In this it is clear he will have vocal allies in many other EU capitals. But it is not going to be easy.