Europe

So after a few hours of outrage in the Tory party, David Cameron’s aides have announced that he didn’t say ministers would have to support his stance during the EU referendum or leave government. Number 10 has clarified the Prime Minister’s remarks, saying they only apply to ministers’ stances during the renegotiation, not the period of campaigning leading up to the referendum. The Prime Minister’s official spokeswoman said: ‘The PM was clearly talking yesterday about the position on collective responsibility during the renegotiation, a position that the PM has set out previously, including in the House during the Queen’s Speech debate, a position that, I think, has been over-interpreted by

Over the last few weeks, a string of senior Tories have urged Zac Goldsmith to run for Mayor of London. Goldsmith is, as I report in the Mail on Sunday, regarded by the Tory hierarchy as giving the party the best chance of keeping City Hall blue. In a contest that it will be very difficult for the Tories to win, Goldsmith scrambles the race—what other Tory would get Green second preferences? The attraction of Goldsmith is particularly strong as Nick Ferrari, as Daniel Boffey writes in the Observer, is unlikely to throw his hat in the ring. At the top of the Tory party, there is a belief that

Nigel Farage’s latest intervention—declaring that Ukip is ‘going to take the lead making the case for voting to leave the EU in the referendum—neatly sums up the dilemma facing the Out campaign. On the one hand, there’s a danger that if it doesn’t get moving now then the In campaign will have a massive, and possibly insurmountable, advantage by the time the vote is actually called. On the other, if Out is too closely associated with Ukip then it won’t be able to get the 50.1 percent of the vote that it needs to win the referendum. For while Farage might be quite brilliant at motivating the 13 percent who

David Cameron has to walk two tightropes on Europe, and at the same time too. The first is to negotiate a deal with other European leaders that satisfies the bulk of his Euro-sceptic party. If this was not difficult enough, simultaneously Cameron has to show voters that the European question isn’t consuming all of his government’s energies. For despite its importance, it still rankles relatively low on the public’s list of priorities. To address the latter point, I’m told that Cameron will make a major domestic policy announcement in the week of every EU summit in an effort to show that he is not taking his eyes off the home front.

Who will speak up for Britain’s relationship with Europe? Even those abroad have noticed that the recent talk from the government and pressure groups has all been tinged with Euroscepticism. During David Cameron’s visit to France yesterday, the French foreign minister Laurent Fabius said he was unhappy with this attitude: ‘I find this process quite dangerous … The British population has got used to being repeatedly told: ‘Europe is a bad thing’, and the day they are asked to decide, the risk is that they will say well you told us: ‘Europe is a bad thing’.” Fabius went on to use a football analogy to describe Britain’s behaviour: ‘One can’t join a football club and

I suppose, if you could look deep into the mind of somebody who was passionately keen that Britain should leave the European Union then, in among things like old episodes of Dad’s Army and unassailable convictions that Cornwall produces some perfectly good vintages, and so on, you might also spot a vision of the future. In this vision, our referendum will have been and gone and Britain will have seen the light and left the EU. Everybody will have been convinced. Even Nick Clegg. The question will have been settled for a generation at least, and there will be no need to talk about it anymore and we’ll be able

The government’s announcement that EU migrants will not be able to vote in the EU referendum tells us a number of things about the way David Cameron is approaching this vote. Firstly, he’s keen to show everyone that he’s getting on with it – indeed, the Prime Minister seems reinvigorated on all fronts at the moment – and making announcements about the franchise is just one example of that. The second is that Cameron does not want the debate about the referendum to be one of an Establishment stitch-up. Allowing EU citizens to vote would be one way of encouraging such a narrative from certain parts of the ‘Out’ camp.

Five days before the Queen’s Speech, David Cameron is taking on the first big challenge of this new Parliament: renegotiating our relationship with the EU. He’s undertaking a whistle-stop tour of European capitals today, focusing on the smaller countries at first. As the Prime Minister sets off for a summit in Riga in Latvia, he was keen to point out that it’s far from a hop, skip and jump to a referendum next year: ‘These talks will not be easy. They will not be quick. There will be different views and disagreements along the way. But by working together in the right spirit and sticking at it, I believe we can find solutions that will address

Wolfgang Schäuble’s decision to link the British renegotiation to changes to the governance of the Eurozone is highly significant. In an interview the German Finance Minister told the Wall Street Journal that he has discussed George Osborne ‘coming to Berlin so that we can think together about how we can combine the British position with the urgent need for a strengthened governance of the eurozone’. Schäuble went on to say that ‘the structure of this currency union will stay fragile as long as its governance isn’t substantially reinforced. Maybe there is a chance to combine both goals’. Schäuble’s comments are the most encouragement that the government has had on the

George Osborne has moved to strengthen his personal, political operation by hiring the political editor of the Daily Mail James Chapman as his director of communications. This beefing up of his media team will be seen in Westminster as a statement of political intent by the Chancellor; it gives him a more formidable operation than any of the other likely contenders for the Tory leadership. I am told that Chapman will be handling communications for Osborne in his role as both Chancellor and First Secretary of State. One of the reasons that Osborne was keen to hire a Fleet Street heavy hitter to be his director of communications, he’s never

Up until Thursday night, everything that David Cameron and George Osborne had done in government had had to be agreed by the Liberal Democrats. Every policy had to go through the ‘Quad’, the coalition government’s decision making body made up of Cameron, Osborne, Clegg and Alexander. That doesn’t have to happen anymore. As one Downing Street figure says: ‘It is all completely different now, we can power forward with what we want to do. There’s no need for everything to be watered down. It’s invigorating’. Not having to manage a coalition, also frees up huge amounts of time for both Cameron and the Number 10 operation. It would be well

Amidst the hullabaloo of the general election campaign, one thing that has generally gone unnoticed in Britain’s political discourse is the worsening Greek situation. You now have European finance ministers openly talking about the possibility of a Greek default. What has changed is that there is now no goodwill and very little trust between Greece and the rest of the Eurozone. The rest of the Eurozone think that the Greeks are obfuscating and not providing the details needed. While the Syriza-led Greek government feel that the rest of the Eurozone is not providing them with the political cover they need to make a deal. They feel that the Eurozone’s insistence