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The Tory Rebellion


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Photo of David Cameron at a press conference

Prime Minister David Cameron arriving in Brussels, October 23


On Thursday, no one in Parliament was talking about anything except the mess in Greece and the impending collapse of the euro. A couple of Tory members were telling me why it was inevitable that the European currency would break up—and soon—when word spread that their colleague Mark Hoban, a minister in the Treasury, had made a terrible gaffe. Responding to a hostile question about whether Britain would ever join the common European currency, Hoban had replied: “I don’t think there is any intention for us to join the euro at the time when it is breaking up.” In short, the country’s ruling party finds itself in a position where it is not supposed to say things that all of its members know. 

At almost any other moment of the past quarter-century, Britain’s Tories would be reaping an electoral bonanza from the European Union’s troubles. Since Margaret Thatcher’s time they have been the most Euroskeptic party in any major European country, and now events are leading Britons to see things their way. The EU’s leaders, particularly Nicolas Sarkozy, looked antidemocratic last week when they hammered Greek president George Papandreou’s proposal to consult his citizens over a major international obligation. But Europe has not shown its best face to Britain for a long time. A poll taken by the socialist Fabian Society a year ago found that more than twice as many U.K. citizens saw EU membership as a “bad thing” than saw it as a “good thing.” In recent weeks, Sarkozy has been campaigning for a Europe-wide financial transaction tax that would pay for development aid to poor countries—and since London dominates the banking sector of Europe, at least 60 percent of that tax would be collected in Britain. 

But the Tories have a problem. For the first time since the premiership of Edward Heath in the early 1970s, a Conservative-led government is pursuing Europe-friendly policies. Rather than leading Britain into war against the euro, Tory backbenchers have had to wage a rebellion against their party leader, Prime Minister David Cameron. Cameron has long been an ideological mystery. Like Barack Obama, he comes out of the red-hot partisan core of his party, but campaigned as a centrist who would reach out to political opponents. Whereas Obama rushed back to his partisan allies after being elected, Cameron has loitered in the center, reaching out to his party’s foes. At the Conservative party conference this fall he called for gay marriage. He has attacked banks for their greed. He has an energy policy that focuses on climate change rather than energy prices. And he has long promised to stop his party from—in his words—“banging on about Europe.” This is a promise that he has kept. 

Partly out of necessity. Cameron’s Tories fared worse than expected in last year’s elections, forcing them into a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. The Lib Dems, as they are called, are the most Europhile party in English politics. What is more, when Tony Blair’s support for the Iraq war created an opening for an antiwar party on the left, the Lib Dems filled it. One Tory described Labour to me as the party of his adversaries and the Lib Dems as the party of his enemies. Their leader, Nick Clegg, who has a Dutch mother and a Spanish wife, urged last week that Britain forge closer ties with Europe, arguing that Britain has America’s ear only when it can show it is listened to by Europe. This does not mean he sees the United States as unworthy of emulation: Clegg has lately been attacked in the newspapers over a £36 million loan to a steel company in his constituency that would create 50 [sic] jobs.

Whether Cameron’s tepidity on Europe has to do with conviction or the realities of coalition politics, it is costing him in public opinion. Fifty-five percent of voters say he is out of touch. He has a particular problem among women, only 13 percent of whom see his party as close to their concerns; 79 percent of the public believe the Tories are close to the concerns of the rich. And his party, naturally, is beginning to grow restless. That is how Cameron came, two weeks ago, to be the target of the largest intraparty rebellion against the EU in British history. 

In the early 1990s, when Tory prime minister John Major brought his party behind the Maastricht Treaty, which consolidated power in Brussels, there were a few dozen Euroskeptic “Maastricht rebels” who took their case to the country and did great damage to Major’s standing. Major’s intimates called them “the bastards.” Some things don’t change—the Spectator’s political editor James Forsyth reported recently that those around Cameron refer to today’s Euroskeptics as “30 to 40 sh—s.” 

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