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BARACK Obama is president of the United States, commands an army fighting in Afghanistan and is leader of the western world.

For him to take the time to phone David Cameron in the midst of the Algerian hostage crisis to warn him off taking Britain out of Europe is significant.

Obama is right to be concerned about Cameron’s increasingly dangerous posturing on Europe, which is all about buying off his lunatic fringe of backbenchers – and not about what’s best for Britain.

Cameron is also trying to shore up his party’s vote in marginal constituencies down south where the absurd UK Independence Party show signs of making inroads into Tory support.

Let us recap Obama’s message in less diplomatic language than the official version of the conversation released yesterday: David Cameron should stop behaving like an idiot and start behaving like a statesman.

As we said on this page last week, the EU is not perfect. far from it. Its fishing policy, for example, is a disaster.

But better to part of something imperfect than to languish outside, looking in while the rest of Europe marches on without us.

We simply cannot have the whole economic future of the UK thrown into doubt because UKIP are nipping at Cameron’s heels in the seats he needs to win in England at the next election.

Do we want to go back to the days when you had to get customs clearance to receive a package posted to you by relatives overseas? Surely not. Do we want to stop Scots being able to work in Europe? Surely not.

The Eurosceptic wing of the Tories, which had been lurking in the shadows in virtual irrelevance, is suddenly back in the Conservative driving seat and apparently calling the shots on British foreign policy.

It is a measure of Cameron’s weakness and lack of backbone that he has allowed himself to be dragged on to territory that no self-respecting statesman would occupy.

And how embarrassing for Britain that the president of the US is talking more sense about our future in Europe than our own lightweight prime minister.

Insider dealing

Drug pedlar Paul McIntyre thought that prison held no bars for him – and he was right.

This dealer in death, who flooded the streets with heroin, operated a nationwide drug ring from two Scots prisons as he served four years for dealing.

McIntyre used mobile phones smuggled into jail to pull the strings for his bagmen, hangers-on and accomplices on the outside.

What an indictment of prison when people like McIntyre are able to run their criminal empires by phone from their cell.

This is a genuine scandal – and what makes it worse it that even as you read this, other villains will be on their phones from jail orchestrating their criminal ­operations, too, updating their Facebook pages and surfing the internet in an ­absolute insult to the law-abiding majority.

If the Scottish Prison Service can’t stop mobile phones being smuggled into jails, then it’s hardly worth locking people up in the first place.