Between June 4th and June 7th, Europeans from twenty-seven member states will go to the polls to elect a new European Parliament. One man, however, is more likely to tip the balance of power in Strasbourg than the electorates of most individual countries. That man is David Cameron. In 2005, when campaigning for the leadership of the Conservative Party, Cameron sought to ingratiate himself to the Eurosceptic wing of his party by making a pledge. Choose me, he assured them, and I’ll bring the Conservatives out of the mainstream centre-right political grouping in the European Parliament, the EPP (European People’s Party), after the next elections. The icing on this isolation cake was the surreptitious deselection and suspicious retirements of old-style pro-European Tory MEPs, and the imposition of control from Central Office during the MEP corruption scandals of Summer 2008.
Why exactly did the Cameroonian plan tug on the heartstrings of the John Redwoods and William Hagues of this world? Above all, it’s important to remember that the modern-day British correlation between Left and Right and Europhile and Eurosceptic is an anomaly in international terms as well as historically (Labour’s 1983 manifesto promised, for example, to pull Britain out of the then-EEC). Your most ardent Superstaters are likely to be found, not in the Socialist bloc, but within Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats or Nicolas Sarkozy’s UMP. The Tories smell a federalist scent wafting around the hemicycle, and it gives them the jitters. For them, there’s nothing worse than the familiar refrain of common security, immigration and foreign policies. And don’t get the anti-Maastricht veterans started on the Lisbon Treaty (no really, please don’t).
