This is - unlike most from Christopher Booker - just plain wrong.
Cameron has not wanted to provoke a LEGAL wrangle over withdrawal of ratification of a treaty IN FORCE - if he can help it. A legal wrangle could be lost and, if it were lost, it would be irretrievable. It would also be a monstrous diversion of effort. But he's well aware that Klaus will not sign until every option - they will have discussed it! - has been closed and the Irish opt-outs present another stumbling block. Why stir up a hornet's nest - and risk everything - if you don't have to?
Cameron's views of the Treaty itself are forthright and vituperative and only those who want to think the worst have failed to mention that.
This is the kind of damage UKIP has done to Britain - making populist noises to gain cheap votes and always - always - playing the EU's game of preventing any progress being made to derail the EU’s progress.
Christina Speight
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 14.6.09
David Cameron's cowardly caveat on a Euro referendum
The last thing Mr Cameron wants is a referendum in which Britain would be likely to vote against the treaty by a huge margin, because he knows this would provoke the most almighty row, says Christopher Booker.
By Christopher Booker
Last week's Euro elections must rank as the oddest national election ever held in Britain. The Tories romped home as winners, with 28 MEPs. Look again at the figures, however, and it can be seen that they won only 28 per cent of the votes, on a pitiful 34 per cent turnout.
[That rather indicates general lack of concern or involvement! -cs]
Their candidates thus won the support of less than 10 per cent of the electorate. To put it another way, nine out of 10 people in Britain didn't vote for them.
One reason why Mr Cameron's party didn't exactly receive the unqualified endorsement of the British people was the bizarre game he had been playing to curry favour with an increasingly Euro-cynical electorate.
Determined as he is not to "bang on about Europe" (ie, to admit how far this country is now ruled by Brussels rather than Westminster), he therefore reserved the focus of his attack for the referendum he was promising on the "Not-the-Constitution" Lisbon Treaty.
Whenever challenged on this, however, he was very careful to commit himself to a referendum only so long as the treaty hadn't by then been ratified by everyone else. What he is banking on, of course, is that by the time he enters Downing Street this will have happened, letting him off the hook.
[There is no proof of this at all - just hostile supposition -cs]
The last thing Mr Cameron wants is a referendum in which Britain would be likely to vote against the treaty by a huge margin, because he knows this would provoke the most almighty row with all our 26 "partners" and a major crisis in Britain's relations with the EU. He and William Hague were thus able to make tough-sounding noises about the "shameless" way in which Gordon Brown had broken his manifesto promise of a referendum, in the near-certainty that they themselves will never have to act toughly by honouring their own promise.
Not the least reason why Ukip came second last week
[The greatest reason was a protest vote against MPs’ expenses! This UKIP black propaganda was probably the secoind reason-cs] ,
with two and a half million votes (including, I suspect, those of many readers of this column), was that they saw through the weaselly game Mr Cameron was trying to play and were far from pleased by what they saw.
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