An open letter to David Cameron by Charles Grant
Dear Prime Minister, The bitter rows over the appointment of Jean-Claude Juncker to the Commission presidency show what a difficult task you have set yourself: negotiating reforms to the EU and then winning a referendum in 2017 on keeping Britain in. Some of the reforms you want would require unanimity among EU governments, and others a qualified majority – and none of them is achievable unless you can find many allies. Yet in the vote on Juncker’s appointment only Hungary backed you. You and your team still feel bitter about the Juncker affair. You saw the system of Spitzenkandidaten – whereby the candidate of the party with the most MEPs becomes president – as a bid by the European Parliament to grab more power than the EU treaties have given it. You understood that the system would do little for democracy in the EU, since most of those voting in the European elections had never heard of the candidates. And you thought Juncker was not the ideal person to modernise the EU. Many leaders agreed with you on these points (as did the CER). Yet 26 of them backed the Luxembourger, because they really thought Spitzenkandidaten would enhance democracy, or they did not want to cross Germany once it had declared for Juncker, or they thought he would win and wanted to secure a good job for their commissioner. For the first time in the history of the EU, a big country was steamrollered on an issue that it considered a vital national interest.
So you and your colleagues have every reason to feel aggrieved. But I fear that the sense of grievance may prevent you from grasping that your government has a serious credibility problem in other EU capitals. Some leaders – including those sympathetic to Britain – ask if you are not more focused on party management, satisfying Conservative eurosceptics and winning back votes from UKIP than on keeping Britain in the EU. These leaders observe your recent reshuffle, in which you sacked ministers favourable to the EU and the European Court of Human Rights. They look at your choice of commissioner: for the tactical benefit of avoiding a by-election you appointed an unknown member of the House of Lords (though happily it turns out that Jonathan Hill is both serious and pro-EU). They recall the strident manner of your opposition to Juncker, even when it was clear that he would win; and some of them claim that you threatened to