Four lessons from Merkel’s Slapdown of Cameron

Yesterday’s political news was dominated by a very public slap down of David Cameron by the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel. Briefing overnight suggested she told our Prime Minister last month that his proposals on immigration – or rather his nudges and winks on positioning, because he has no policy proposals – risked approaching “a point of no return”. In case the message wasn’t clear, her spokesman clarified it further at lunchtime yesterday: “The higher principle of freedom of movement in general should not be meddled with”, he said.

At first glance this might just seem to be another episode in the ongoing soap opera of the Conservatives’ obsession with Europe. But it is a more telling moment than that. Because what it reveals is that to the extent David Cameron ever had a “European strategy”, it is one that is now well and truly stranded on the buffers.

Four lessons in particular jump out.

1. Blackmailing our EU allies doesn’t work. The way to get change in the EU is unglamorous: to build up relationships and alliances over time. Eurosceptic orthodoxy on the other hand is that we must be prepared to wave around the threat of exit to give us bargaining power. Since Cameron began flirting with the possibility of leaving the EU if he doesn’t get his way, he has lost a vote on the Commission Presidency by 26 votes to 2, and has been presented with a bill for £1.7bn. Now Angela Merkel has made clear that if Britain wants to take action that makes membership of the EU impossible, that’s a matter for us. They are prepared to let us go. It leaves Cameron’s blackmail strategy in tatters – not simply as diplomatically stupid, but more importantly as politically ineffective.

2. Cameron can’t rely on obscurity about his EU demands any more. For months, David Cameron has had to walk a fine line between the demands of the Eurosceptics in his own party and the limits of what our EU allies will accept. His main navigating tactic has been obscurity about what his demands will be. He knew that if he was too specific, either EU leaders would tell him what he asked for was impossible, or his backbenches would tell him it was nowhere near enough. Or even both. But obscurity about what he wants is no longer an option. Gone are the days when vague hints at treaty renegotiation can be surfaced without EU leaders and UK Eurosceptics alike being prepared to a) ask what exactly is being proposed, and b) comment on their desirability and feasibility. And when they comment, the irreconcilability of the two groups whose support he needs becomes crystal clear.

3. Tory Eurosceptics want Cameron to fail, not succeed. One of the most notable things about slapdowns to Cameron’s posturing on Europe is to watch who celebrates them. Chief celebrators include dozens of Tory backbenchers, whose true interest lies not in Cameron’s success or even their party’s success, but in Britain leaving the EU. That is why Jacob Rees-Mogg seized on Merkel’s remarks this morning to comment, with thinly-veiled glee, that “it is looking increasingly unlikely that it will be possible to get a successful renegotiation”. David Cameron finds himself in the quite ludicrous position of scrambling around for policies to placate precisely those in his own party who actually want him to fail.

4. Cameron’s approach to immigration policy is putting his own political survival above the national interest. We now find ourselves in a world where possible immigration proposals are briefed out of various parts of Cameron’s team at constant rate. But the main object of these proposals is not to come up with better immigration policy. The aim is to find a magic bus on which both Bill Cash, wavering Tory defectors to UKIP and Angela Merkel can all ride happily. There is no such bus. Success for Cameron in a matter as fundamental as immigration policy has become about pulling a trick to keep himself alive politically, not about securing our country’s national interest.

Put all this together, and you have a Prime Minister who – despite his professed desire to keep Britain in the EU – seems to be doing everything in his power to take us out of it. He is reliant on a blackmail strategy which doesn’t work and whose bluff has been called. He is trying to appease Eurosceptics who want exit not appeasement. He is aiming to keep Farage’s electoral threat to the Tories at bay by taking steps that only further encourage Eurosceptic Tories to defect to UKIP. And he has shown that he is prepared to put a sensible immigration policy & our membership of the EU at risk in order to help placate his party’s civil war on Europe.

The fact that this adds up to a crisis of political management is the Tories’ problem, and I can’t pretend it concerns me greatly. The fact that this is putting our national interest at risk, however, should be a serious concern to us all.

Stewart Wood is a Labour Peer and a member of the Shadow Cabinet