With Merkel believing UK membership is a lost cause, and Hungary’s autocratic PM his only ally, the Tory prime minister is increasingly marginalised in Brussels



Five weeks before an election that appears likely to settle decades of British agonising over its relationship with the rest of Europe, the UK and its prime minister have seldom looked so lonely and marginalised in the European Union.

That’s not because of the other Europeans. The Germans, the Scandinavians, the east Europeans, even the French are all keen to keep Britain in the European Union. But there are limits to what they will give David Cameron to make that possible.

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Their readiness for concessions will be sorely tested if Cameron wins a second term because, as Ed Miliband described on Monday, Britain’s 2017 in/out referendum will coincide with a Conservative party leadership battle in which true-blue Europhobia will be given free rein.

Cameron’s five years of open disdain for the EU and all its works will be magnified as the contenders engage in a festival of Europe-bashing. On the other side of the channel, they will not be amused. Enough is enough.

In Brussels and other key EU capitals the mood is already one of resignation at what they see as British tantrums and puzzlement over what Cameron actually wants from his pledge to reset the terms of Britain’s EU membership.

Most seriously for Cameron, according to officials and diplomats familiar with the thinking and the private conversations, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, is gravitating towards the view that Britain is a lost cause.

“There is no meeting of minds. They have radically different views on the fundamental direction of the EU,” said one senior source. “That’s the biggest faultline between them.”

Privately, Cameron has sought to explain to Merkel why, in his repeatedly delayed January 2013 speech on the EU, he decided to call an in/out referendum on Britain’s EU membership by 2017. The EU referendum issue, he told Merkel, was his “toxic legacy”. The boil had to be lanced.

Since then the two have battled over whether Luxembourg’s Jean-Claude Juncker should be head of the European commission, over the free movement of labour within the EU, and Cameron needlessly antagonised Merkel last year by taking her rightwing anti-euro critics, the Alternative for Germany party, into the Tory-led caucus in the European parliament.

Merkel is now said to take the view: “If they want to go, they’ll have to go.” Unless it suits her, she won’t be doing Cameron any favours.

The French find it easier to take a similar view, not least since they see relations with Britain as more of a state-to-state affair rather than as one of alliances and interests within the EU.

Besides, Downing Street is clearly not reckoning on gaining French support for its bid to refashion membership terms. In the past fortnight Cameron and George Osborne have calculatedly introduced France into the election campaign as an object of ridicule, the kind of country Britain might become if Miliband became prime minister.

At an EU summit 10 days ago, Cameron quipped that the other Europeans “will be glad to see the back of me”. The two-day session was a study in British marginalisation. While the main leaders stayed up till 2am arguing about Greece and what it needed to do to stay in the single currency, Cameron was in bed.

On the other big issues, Britain also stood apart. The Ukraine conflict and what to do about Russia’s Vladimir Putin is being handled by Germany and France. Britain’s role is minimal. “Cameron is just not present,” said a senior European commission official very sympathetic to the UK role in Europe. “He’s not really taking part.”

The British elite has long liked to brag that in international and European affairs the UK punches above its weight. Under Cameron, that boast is no longer credible as the UK has retreated from big common problems and sought to focus on the peripheral. At the same summit, for example, he raised the issue of a VAT problem for small firms. This was not on the agenda and no one else was interested.

He also announced a new fund for building democracy in post-Soviet states and the Balkans. It is a purely British fund, with no European involvement, so EU officials wondered why he came to Brussels to announce it.

Italy, France, and Germany are also pushing for radical new policies to deal with the Mediterranean migration emergency and the likelihood of an even greater influx of illegal migrants via Libya. Meanwhile, Theresa May, the home secretary, has pointed Britain in the opposite direction, arguing that anything that legalises any form of illegal immigration would be strongly opposed by the UK.

When Cameron laid out his argument for changes to the EU in January 2013 and announced the referendum, he barely mentioned immigration. But by last November in another big speech detailing his plans for the EU, the prime minister had apparently decided immigration was the main issue.

For the Europeans, this is an infuriating case of constantly moving the goalposts. For more than two years, Cameron has regularly demanded changes to the EU, requested that concessions be made so he can repatriate powers from Brussels, win the referendum and keep the UK in. But he has yet to tell the other 27 heads of government what he wants.

“We need more concrete British demands,” Donald Tusk, the president of the European council and former Polish prime minister, told the Guardian three weeks ago. Tusk organises and chairs EU summits and will have a key mediation role over the British issue, which he describes as one of his top three dossiers. He said he wanted to help solve the British problem in a “limited and rational way”, but in effect ruled out a renegotiation of the Lisbon treaty to accommodate the British.

Reopening the treaty has long been Cameron’s main demand, although he has also been told authoritatively that it will not happen. “No one thinks he’s credible,” said Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform thinktank. “Cameron wants to have his cake and eat it.”

If it is not clear what Cameron wants, that may be because a vast research project launched by the coalition failed to help Cameron’s case. In 2012, the government ordered the Balance of Competences Review, an exhaustive examination of the EU, its costs and benefits. The review produced 3,000 pages in 32 chapters, found little objectionable in the EU and no case for repatriating powers from Brussels. The cross-party European Union committee of the House of Lords, which carried out the review, has accused ministers of burying it because the findings did not accord with Cameron’s claims of Brussels acquiring too many powers.



Britain has plenty of natural allies in the EU – in Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Poland and central Europe. But none of them any longer wants to be associated with the British prime minister, with the exception of the rightwing Viktor Orbán of Hungary, who is increasingly a rogue element in the EU and a leader who prefers Putin to his colleagues in Europe or Nato.

Last week Denis MacShane, a former Labour minister for Europe, published Brexit: How Britain will Leave Europe, a book on why he thinks Britain is sleepwalking towards quitting the EU. In 1997, he recounts, Tony Blair inherited from John Major the need to stage a referendum if he wanted to take Britain into the European single currency. The referendum requirement was one reason Blair balked. Asked why he would not hold the vote, Blair replied: “I am not going down in fucking history as the prime minister who took Britain out of Europe.”

If Cameron is returned to Downing Street, he may not be able to say the same.