“IT’S like being gay—it’s just not something you’d want to admit to in the Conservative Party,” says an ambitious young Tory MP of his mildly pro-European proclivity. “None of us is really ‘out’,” says a like-minded colleague, unhappily. “There’s nothing to gain by wrecking your career and your party at the same time.”

Neither MP loves the greedy, profligate European Union. One worries particularly about a democratic deficit: British voters have only once been permitted a vote on Europe, in a referendum in 1975. Yet both calculate, as British governments have done for four decades, that the benefits of belonging to the European club, including having a guiding hand in the world’s biggest free trade zone, are worth the pain. That view is shared by David Cameron, the Tory prime minister, and a “strong majority” of his cabinet ministers, according to one of them. But they tend to avoid the subject of Europe, too. Even as Mr Cameron maintains he wants to stay in the EU he manages to say almost nothing positive about an alliance that, in his words, “picks the pockets” of taxpayers.

Euroscepticism has consumed the Conservative Party. By one estimate, two-thirds of the Tories’ 304 MPs would leave the EU either tomorrow or in the event that Britain cannot negotiate a looser relationship with it. Of the remainder, less than a dozen are prepared to risk the opprobrium of their colleagues, constituency satraps and right-wing newspapers by speaking up for the EU. There is a democratic deficit in the party, too. One MP describes having joined a parliamentary rebellion on Europe last year—in which 81 Tory MPs defied their whips to demand a referendum on EU membership—in fear of an ear-bashing from his constituency Tory association if he did not.

No wonder Britain appears to be inching out of the EU. The quitters have the best tunes and the stickers can hardly be heard. The Eurosceptics are passionate, organised and vigorously championed by right-wing newspapers. They are also popular (54% of Britons want out, according to the latest ComRes poll) and increasingly sophisticated in their arguments. A new sort of Eurosceptic, prominent among newer Tory MPs, cites economic rather than nationalistic reasons for leaving the EU. They claim, probably spuriously, that Britain could still enjoy all the fruits of the single market in exile. Europhiles (or at least those who fear that that is not true) are by comparison disparate, cowed and unloved. On the opposition benches, the Labour Party, which is broadly pro-European, is keener to watch Mr Cameron squirm than to provide an alternative target for Euro-haters. Hence its support in October for another Tory rebellion, over the EU’s next budget, that dealt the government its first major parliamentary defeat. Another Europhilic voice, big business, is also hushed, intimidated by the red-raw politics of the issue. “Business is in the closet on Europe,” a senior banker says.

Yet the beginnings of a repulse are discernible. As a referendum on Britain’s EU membership, probably after the 2015 general election, comes to seem ever more likely, pro-Europeans have been spooked into action. Ed Miliband, Labour’s leader, vowed on November 19th not to let Britain “sleepwalk” towards a Brixit. He was speaking at the annual meeting of the CBI, an employers group, whose boss, Sir Roger Carr, also urged that Europe be seen “as the launch pad from which our global trade can expand, not the land mass from which we retreat.” Then on November 28th a more ardent Labour Europhile, Tony Blair, warned that drifting out of Europe was a grave threat to Britain’s global heft.

Even some Eurosceptic Tories fear that things are getting out of hand. On November 25th Boris Johnson, the popular Tory mayor of London and a rambunctious Brussels-basher, moderated his former crowd-pleasing support for an “In-Out” referendum. “With great respect to the sort of in-outers,” he said, “I don’t think it does boil down to such a simple question.” What he probably meant was: Britain must not leave.

Limp Eurolovers

This is an early indication of what a referendum campaign might look like. The leaders of all three main parties—the Liberal Democrats being most Europhile of all—would line up for an “In” vote. Business would back them. British voters, prone to the conservatism that referenda encourage, might very well do as they ask. That is what happened in 1975, when a small majority in favour of quitting the European club turned dramatically into a large majority for staying put.

Yet this is not 1975. Mr Cameron is hamstrung by fear of splitting his party; Mr Miliband is reluctant to take up the running on an issue in which he sees little electoral benefit. These days even Europhiles find it hard to get excited about Britain’s EU membership. The dream of European solidarity, an important subtext to the 1975 referendum campaign, is hardly meaningful to a generation with no memory of the second world war. There is no prospect of Mr Cameron emulating one of his predecessors, Margaret Thatcher, and campaigning for an “In” vote in a woolly jersey decorated with European national flags.

The main pro-Europe argument would therefore be, as it was in 1975, that Britons would be poorer outside. Unfortunately, this argument is far harder to make when news bulletins are filled with euro-zone havoc. And the bulletins could soon turn much uglier for Britain. Later in December EU leaders will meet to discuss the terms of a putative euro-zone banking union. Failure to provide adequate safeguards for Britain’s financial sector would be an enormous setback to Britain’s relations with the EU and would signal that countries outside the euro zone are losing influence. That would make it even harder for Mr Cameron to do other than fulminate against the EU. No wonder the prime minister keeps postponing a big speech on Europe he has long been due to make: he simply doesn’t know what to say.