Seven reasons why Cameron will never be able to satisfy Tory Eurosceptics

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/16/seven-reasons-cameron-satisfy-eurosceptics

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Like many Eurosceptics these days, the Tory MEP Daniel Hannan would quite rightly bristle at being labelled a "Little Englander". A highly cultured polyglot, he's perfectly at home on the continent and happy to use Brussels as a bully pulpit to bash governments back home – something that would once have been regarded as terribly bad form. What he and his ilk object to, at least in part, is Britain being stuck in what they see as a hopelessly over-regulated historical relic when by rights we should be a freewheeling world trader.

But the past still matters as much as the future. Preserving national sovereignty probably remains Conservative sceptics' ultimate concern. Inevitably, this no surrender stance connects them umbilically not only to their icon Margaret Thatcher, but to her icon Winston Churchill.

It also accounts for their hatred of her immediate predecessor, Ted Heath, who supposedly sold the party and the country down the river by taking it into Europe in the first place.

Of course, as Michael Heseltine pointed out earlier in the week, Eurosceptics are forced to forget about Thatcher's initially pragmatic European policy – and that she was responsible for one of the biggest surrenders of UK sovereignty, the Single European Act. Indeed, as others have pointed out, sceptics would be well advised not to read her famous Bruges speech too closely, lest they remind themselves of the awkward truth that, even though she grew increasingly impatient with Europe when she was prime minister, she showed no signs of wanting to actually leave what was then the European community.

In fact, it's another of their heroine's classic speeches that comes closest to serving as a sacred text for Tory sceptics. Her parliamentary No, No, No not only told Brussels where to get off, but triggered what they insist on seeing as the Europhile plot that saw her stabbed in the back by Geoffrey Howe, challenged for the leadership by Heseltine, persuaded to step down by Ken Clarke, and replaced by John Major – the architect of the Maastricht treaty which, while it saved us from the single currency, drove us even deeper into what henceforth became the European Union.

It was on Major's watch, of course, that Britain was forced into a humiliating exit from the European exchange rate mechanism on "Black Wednesday" – a memory burned into sceptics' brains by the shell-shocked speech made by Norman Lamont (you can see a young David Cameron walking in front of Lamont in the first few seconds of this video) after he'd blown billions trying (but failing) to save sterling.

To this day, this episode provides proof, should proof be needed, that getting too closely entangled in Europe only ever ends in tears. The fact that the euro – which the ERM helped usher in – is now in so much trouble only goes to show, sceptics believe, that we are better off out of the whole sorry mess.

The ensuing civil war over Maastricht's ratification tore the party apart and made Major look "weak, weak, weak", turning what may well have been a Labour victory anyway into a landslide that took more than a decade to overturn – a repeat of which, apparently, can only be prevented by a prime minister who follows his party rather than lead it.

Free from the shabby compromises made necessary by being in office, those 13 years in opposition simply fuelled Eurosceptic fantasies – fantasies that David Cameron to some extent shared and was in any case too weak to try to tackle head on. As a result, Europe was always going to be the iceberg issue for a Tory government.

Consequently, the prime minister finds himself torn between the temptation to talk and act tough in order to please his party – something that briefly turned him into a Eurosceptic hero in December 2011 – and the day-to-day business of promoting the national interest in an interdependent, multi-level and multinational political and economic space. Doing anything like the latter, however, precludes adopting wholesale the pub-ready populism of Nigel Farage, whose beating up of Tony Blair – the man who for so long gave the Tories such a pasting – afforded Conservatives as much pleasure as it did Ukippers.

Cameron should know by now, then, that he can never really compete nor ever really satisfy. Sadly, that's unlikely to stop him doing his damndest to do so in Amsterdam this Friday.