So British ministers will be free to campaign on the side of their choice in the referendum on European Union membership, but some will be freer than others. In a letter published this week , the British prime minister explained the “wholly exceptional arrangement” under which the convention of collective cabinet responsibility will be suspended. It will happen only once the renegotiation of membership terms is complete, and apply only to the specific question of in or out. There will be no licence to criticise other EU-related business, no open season for bashing Brussels in parliament. Brexit-minded ministers should not deploy their civil servants or advisers as speechwriters or bag-carriers.
The Whitehall machine will purr away as usual in support of government policy, which in this case will be to stay in the EU. The ministerial right to oppose that view will be the freedom of the hobbyist weekender - permission to indulge an old fetish as long as it doesn’t happen on company time. David Cameron makes it clear that this is a special indulgence for the benefit of those ministers whose desire to leave the EU flows from “long-standing, deeply held positions of conviction”. That pointedly doesn’t include Tories yet to show their hand, who might still throw their lot in with the Brexit brigade from short-standing, shallowly held positions of opportunity (otherwise known as Boris).
The purpose of this contortion is to avoid the government falling apart in acrimony, while casting Brexit as a position for the dissenting minority - a schismatic sect respected out of deference to Tory traditions but not allowed status equal to the prime minister’s view. This in turn flows from Cameron’s determination to continue leading the Tories even after they have filed on to opposite sides of the referendum battlefield.
Downing Street is devoting as much effort to thinking about post-plebiscite reconciliation as to the campaign itself. There is no harmonious path, but No 10 still hopes for a relatively controlled explosion, or at least one that doesn’t turn Cameron’s office into a smouldering crater. That means cordoning off the referendum from the rest of the government’s agenda, treating it as old business to be settled from the first term - leaving enough time to get on with some government in the second term. But what? Cameron has reached that autumnal phase of any leadership when priorities are chosen with an eye on legacy.
It is accepted inside No 10 that 2016 will be dominated by EU affairs and, while the prime minister insists he would not resign in the event of a vote to leave, allies privately recognise how unworkable that would be in practice. They know they have to secure a vote to stay in, and that the surrounding Tory trauma will mean that even a victory won’t feel like cause for jubilation. Cameron wants to survive the aftermath long enough to be remembered for something else. His first big announcements of 2016 have returned to themes from the early years of his leadership: addressing the root causes of poverty, recognising that markets are good for generating wealth but insufficient for sharing it, looking forinnovative ways to remove obstacles to social mobility.
“I am not against state intervention ... a rising tide doesn’t lift all boats,” Cameron said on Monday in aspeech on “life chances” that ruminated around questions of character, resilience, social networks and neuroscience between more headline-ready pledges on fixing council estates and vouchers for parenting classes. More speeches in the same discursive vein - on education, prisons and social segregation - are lined up for the coming weeks.
Cameron’s critics on the left dismiss this stuff as a chemical sweetener in the bitter potion of austerity, no easier to swallow than the “big society” was back in the freshly picked Tory leader’s organic salad days. That phase now feels so distant, superseded by events, it is a wonder that he bothers harking back. Unless he actually believes it. This should be impossible, given the familiar diagnosis of Cameron as congenitally unable to believe in anything beyond his own entitlement to power.
Yet, I suspect the reality is more complex. Before he entered Downing Street, Cameron wanted to be a liberal, compassionate Tory , and he still wants to be one as he ponders departure. But in the intervening years he had to handle coalition with Liberal Democrats, enforce a brutal budget squeeze, fend off Ukip, almost lose a referendum on Scottish independence, defeat Ed Miliband, and renegotiate EU membership during a continent-wide migration crisis, all the while holding his party together.
He needed to do those things more than he wanted to outline an agenda for 21st-century modern Conservatism, and he couldn’t manage both. He reminds me a little bit of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, who spends two plays telling his counsellors about a mission he plans to the Holy Land, then postponing it to deal with fractious alliances and rebellious barons at home. He dies with the crusade unlaunched.
For Cameron, the EU referendum is another campaign that must be fought before he can get back to the destiny he imagines for himself as a crusading social reformer. Downing Street strategists have a fantasy scenario: a domestic agenda based around housing, social mobility and poverty alleviation, which couples classic conservative themes of self-reliance and aspiration with a new streak of conscientious interventionism. Around this synthesis of Tory right and left, wet and dry, moderniser and traditionalist, Thatcherite and one-nation traditions, the party might find common cause to rally, setting aside the bitterness of Euro civil war.
That is the Holy Land to which the prime minister first planned a journey 10 years ago. He still dreams of reaching it before the curtain falls. The destination is always just another tactical bend down the road; if he can just contain cabinet Eurosceptics, get the referendum out of the way, survive the year ... then the legacy work begins. More probably, this epic procrastination will itself be the legacy: a knack for survival, riding victorious from one battlefield to the next, thwarting a range of enemies - impressive but not heroic. The king holds the crown against the odds but reaches the end without having done the one thing he swore to do at the start.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd, 2016
