The Tory Right to Capt. Cameron: "Boil Your Head, mate!"

The moment David Cameron decided to try to bully his MPs into not rebelling over Europe was the day this Tory lost any vestige of respect he’d had for the Prime Minister as a man or as a politician. Politically, it was an enormously sill thing to do, and, on a personal level, it was the act of a very petty man.

When your Prime Minister starts telling everyone – including the President of France – to shut up, rather than engage in debate, you know they’re in the process of losing the plot. Mrs. Thatcher argued – Cameron, like John Major and Ted Heath before him,  just throws hissy fits.

What’s so odd about his handling of Tory MPs is that the alternative tactics – a quiet word in the ear here, a bit of off-line bullying there, the standard mixture of threats and promises – has worked well until now: especially given that the Tories are in a coalition with the sorriest set of malign, incompetent pricks imaginable. But this time something made Cameron decide to escalate to DEFCON 3 when he could simply have let the rebels have their day in parliament, pointed out that the majority of his party had, unlike MPs from other parties, voted against a referendum of their own free will.

What a silly boy! With any luck, Tory right-wingers (well, patriots, actually) will now have the bit between their teeth. Because of the three-line whip local Tory activists – pretty much all of whom loathe everything about the EU – now know for certain that Cameron not only doesn’t share their instincts, he positively despises them (on the issue of Europe, this means he’s basically shouting at the majority of Britons to shut up).

During the 1991 general election I was producing a package with one of the BBC’s senior political correspondents, when he started sneering at the Tory Party’s ridiculous “Little Englander” attitudes to Europe. I asked him how membership of the EU benefitted the UK. He mumbled something about liking to holiday in France: I said it was unlikely that the French would close their borders to British tourists if we left the EU. He said our trade would drop: maybe, but there were plenty of other markets. We would, he said, get “left behind”. Behind what? Finally he said that we wouldn’t have so many nice French cheeses to choose from in Sainsbury’s. 

To give him his due, he then went red with embarrassment and burst into laughter. But his views pretty much summed up the basis of most liberal support for the EU – i.e. France is lovely and so civilised! It was at that moment I realised how weak, how farcically feeble, the arguments in favour of EU membership were.

I have no idea what the consequences of leaving the EU would be – nobody does. I don't even know what would happen if we simply told them to piss off on a regular basis (not much, is my guess). And I’m absolutely certain that the zealotry of our public officials when it comes to implementing silly EU directives and laws – which the rest of Europe blithely ignores – is mainly the result of unpleasant little nonentities exercising the smidgin of power they possess in order to make themselves feel significant. But I do know that when all three of our main political parties are united in refusing to countenance – or even discuss – the possibility of withdrawal, or  to ask the British people directly how they'd feel about the possibility, getting out would probably be a bloody good idea. 

Of course, it’s not going to happen, because “Europe” comes 16^th on the list of voters’ concerns, and only three percent of them spontaneously mention it when discussed. But 96 MPs out of 317 refusing a three-line whip is serious stuff. It’s not exactly time for Cameron to retire to his study with a revolver and a glass of whisky – but maybe the next time his right-wing backbenchers want to freely discuss an issue of enormous concern to them and to many voters, he won’t make the mistake of treating them as if they were uppity oiks from the local state school.

Socialists aren’t the only ones who eventually tire of smug, privileged toffs deciding what's good for them. And we all know what can happen when a commanding officer loses the respect of his men.

Watch your back, Dave!