Europe

The trouble over the European Referendum Bill rather sums up the current state of the relationship between the Conservative party leadership and its more truculent backbenchers. The Bill was meant to be something to cheer up the troops. But it has ended up going down so badly that the whips have been left tearing their hair out and wishing that the government had never introduced it. Some of the policy differences between the leadership and the backbenches will never be resolved, particularly in coalition. But, as so often, a lot of the difficulties with this bill have been caused by poor communication and an inability to take proper soundings. The more one talks to Tory MPs, the more one is struck by how they feel that there is no proper feedback mechanism.

It is to his credit that nuance is a word inimical to Lord Tebbitt. The unashamedly independent voice of the past has written a cutting piece about the coalition, the Lib Dems and the Oldham East by-election. He says: ‘A Lib Dem win would tilt the Coalition even farther Left and away from Conservative policies.’ Many Tory ministers joke that they thought themselves right wing until meeting their Liberal colleague. This is a radical government that many on the right can cheer.

For a while it looked like the West had the upper hand. Belarus' Aleksandr Lukashenko, Europe's last dictator, seemed to be moving away from Russia and closer to the West. A succession of European ministers went to see him and returned to develop packages of support and assistance with his country. In that new "Great Game" played out on Europe's periphery it looked like Vladimir Putin's winning streak was finally coming to en end, after partial success in Georgia and outright victory in Ukraine. Or so European leaders hoped. But any hope of changing Belarus' position has now been dashed with the violent crackdown in Minsk against pro-democracy activists following December's presidential elections.

Today’s papers are full of the Tory right asserting itself. In the Mail On Sunday, Mark Pritchard—secretary of the 1922 committee—demands that the Prime Minister and his allies come clean about any plans to create a long-term political alliance between the Tories and the Lib Dems. In The Sunday Telegraph, there’s a report that Tory rebels will vote with Labour to try and defeat the coalition’s European Union Bill. I suspect that these stories presage one of the major themes of the year, an increasingly assertive right of the Tory parliamentary party. For too long, Cameron has neglected his own MPs both politically and personally. The result is a willingness to cause trouble for the government.

It's Christmas Eve, and the Daily Telegraph have wrapped up their sting operation in time for tomorrow. The final victims are the Foreign Office minister Jeremy Browne and the children's minister Sarah Teather. As it happens, Teather gets off without blemishing her copybook: her greatest indiscretion is to claim that Michael Gove is "deeply relieved" to be in coalition, as it means more funding for schools. Browne, though, is a touch more forthright: he says that Tory immigration policy is "harsh" and "uncharitable," but that Lib Dem involvement will provoke a "more enlightened" outcome. He adds that the Tories' EU grouping contains parties that "are quite nutty and that's an embarrassment to them.

Germany is one of the few countries that Nick Clegg has been able to look to for tips on how to be a successful Liberal party in coalition with a larger Conservative party. In 2006, Guido Westerwelle even took a delegation of Free Democrats to a Lib Dem frontbench meeting. Coffee House once predicted that, if the AV referendum was won, Clegg could one day become Britain's Hans-Dietrich Genscher, a permanent powerbroker. The parties are of course different in many ways. The Free Democrats are decidedly more pro-market and pro-business than the Liberal Democrats. They also have a lot more experience of government. Before the last election, the Free Democrats were part of Helmut Kohl's governments until 1998.

Dick Marty's report on Kosovo leader Hashim Thaci has rightly caused quite a storm. Accusing the recently re-elected Kosovo prime minister of running a mafia-like state, and even controlling a organ-trafficking ring, has not only led to condemnation but is being used by some as an excuse to re-tell conspiracy theories about what actually happened in the 1990s. First things first. The CoE report's accusations should be investigated by at least two courts: ICTY in the Hague and the Kosovo courts (the latter with the help of the 1800-strong EU police-and-justice mission). If any of these fail to take up the task, a court in an EU member-state should take it upon themselves to investigate the allegations.

That the Conservatives and the Lib Dems disagree fundamentally on Europe is a well-known fact. But how much they disagree is rarely put on display as clearly as in today’s European Voice. Andrew Duff, Liberal Democrat MEP and president of the Union of European Federalists, argues that the coalition’s European Union bill – David Lidington’s masterpiece – amounts to “legal pedantry” and will make the UK an “untrustworthy negotiating partner, particularly in matters of treaty amendment, which is such an important driver of European integration.” 'At home, referenda will unleash the forces of populist nationalism. Facile coalitions of nay-sayers will form to block Britain's progress in Europe.

All the attention last week was on the Lib Dem split – but what about the division within the Conservatives? This is the greater threat to the coalition, and while there is not likely to be an earthquake soon, one can discern the outlines of the tectonic plates. Ladbrokes has odds of 5-2 of an election next year, and these don't seem so short when one considers the short life of coalitions in British peacetime history. So where might the tension lie? A while ago, I referred to the bulk of the party as "mainstream Conservatism," as a more useful phrase than the tautological "Tory right". Tim Montgomerie last week drew a distinction between this and what Ken Clarke calls "liberal Conservatism".

Yesterday, I blogged that Serbia's decision not to attend the Nobel Prize ceremony because of Chinese pressure was a shameful stance for the Balkan would-be EU member to take. Many others felt the same. Now, feeling the international pressure, it seems that Serbia's government has decided that the country's Ombudsman, Sasa Jankovic, will attend the event as special representative of Prime Minister Mirko Cvetkovic. A good outcome, and a sensible decision, which will hopefully be followed by a reprimand to Serbia's calculating Foreign Minister, Vuk Jeremić, who originally decided that Serbia would not attend the ceremony.