Conservative party

There is a reluctant acceptance here that Lisbon will have been ratified by next May and that the Tories won’t hold a post-ratification referendum. But it is important to understand why the leadership is getting away with a position that is so unpopular with the grassroots. Partly it is a reflection of the fact that the party has rediscovered its discipline, it wants to win again and is prepared to swallow quite a lot on the way. But more important is that the party believes the leadership is Euro-sceptic; that Cameron is--to use Bruce Anderson’s phrase—not tainted by ‘federasty’. The view here is that if Cameron doesn’t have the time to fight over Lisbon, he’ll still block any further moves to ‘ever closer union.

The phrase “we will not let matters rest” sounds slightly menacing, but it’s completely opaque. Is it time for the Tories to define what they mean by it? The leading article in the Times argues that perhaps it is. ‘Now that the Irish have ratified the Lisbon treaty at the second attempt, the Conservative Party needs to listen to Robert Peel. In 1834 Peel issued a manifesto in Tamworth in which he said the Conservative Party should now accept the Great Reform Act which it had vigorously opposed. Now that David Cameron finds himself struggling to clarify the circumstances in which he will offer the nation a referendum on the Lisbon treaty, he could do worse than echo Peel’s sentiment.

The Tories have been briefing heavily that this would be a policy heavy conference. Indeed, I’m told that every shadow Cabinet member will have at least one substantive announcement to make. But there is relatively little that is genuinely new in the Sunday newspapers. One explanation for this is that the Tories accept that Lisbon is going to crowd out any other story. One senior source told me on Friday that CCHQ thought that nothing other than Europe would have cut through until Sunday afternoon. So far, the Tory containment operation on Europe appears to be just about holding. There is, though, grumbling about Boris’s comments in the Sunday Times which are seem as being distinctly unhelpful and threaten to reignite the stories about tension between him and the leadership.

The Observer’s leading article asks the question: will David Cameron’s modernism serve Britain’s interests? The article’s conclusion is a firm ‘no’; its key is that the ‘Conservatives' apparent relish in tackling the budget deficit is not entirely economic in motivation. It expresses a broader ideological commitment to a smaller state.’ A smaller state is better for Britain. The consistent growth of the state over more than a decade has demolished Britain’s financial strength. In changed economic circumstances, its continued growth is unsustainable. July is a month that should produce a revenue surplus, as tax receipts outweigh borrowing. This year saw a £8.1bn deficit.

The Conservative conference is just hours old, but already Cameron faces a battle to hold the line over Europe and the Lisbon treaty.  He produced his standard response on the Andrew Marr show: that he wanted a referendum if the Czechs refuse to ratify the treaty. And he added: “I don’t want say anything or do anything that would undermine what was being decided and debated in other countries”. Meanwhile, rent-a-quote Europhiles and Eurosceptic Tories exchange blows in Manchester. Leon Brittan described a possible referendum on the Lisbon Treaty as “ludicrous” and Dan Hannan has just told Sky News: “This is not the Conservative party of the past. This is a 1990s story.