Does Cameron want Britain to leave the EU? Restricting vote, mentioning the Nazis and teasing Juncker about brandy makes a Brexit more likely

Until a couple of weeks ago, I was 100% determined that I wanted Britain to remain inside the European Union because I am, at heart, an internationalist.

Now, with a referendum on membership actually on the cards, I am not sure which way I will vote and, feeling more fatalistic, I have contemplated backing an exit.

This is because I would like to give a bloody nose to David Cameron and the wealthy elite whose craven self-interest and vested power helped elect him.

Until very recently, I presumed that the best way to do this would be to vote to leave the EU, an institution that I thought the PM and his tycoon friends cherished.

But, actually, it’s not clear which side most of the wealthy elite or even Mr Cameron are now on in the referendum debate.

Big bosses, led by JCB chairman Lord Bamford, appear to be warming to the idea of a Britain within a free-trade zone but exiled from Brussels and shorn of the inconvenience of protecting their workers and consumers via EU rights and regulations.

Sleep-free triple-shifts and horsemeat “beef” sandwiches for everyone! Or so I imagine went the cheer among the Tory-crony billionaires who, despite Cameron claiming otherwise, are not on the same side as small business owners like my father.

Nor will the Prime Minister, if he does indeed lead a pro-EU campaign, be able to garner the usual support of the press barons.

The owners of The Sun, The Times, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, Daily Express and Daily Star – or 75% of national newspapers digested on a daily basis by Britons – are all virulently Eurosceptic.

And, lastly, it is increasingly unclear whether Cameron himself wants membership of the European Union any longer.

Yesterday’s revelation that he will not let EU migrants and 16- and 17-year-olds vote in the referendum was the biggest possible indicator of ambivalence to Brussels.

The Prime Minister then made the possibility of a Brexit even likelier when he seemed to go out of his way at Chequers to rile EU chief Jean-Claude Juncker, a man he had already made an enemy of last year by stridently campaigning to stop him being elected as the president of the European Commission.

He first reminded Mr Juncker that Britain had saved Europe from the Nazis.
However correct this statement might be – although I’d add that Russia and America might also want a little credit for the feat – such jingoism is guaranteed to rankle most people from continental Europe, and especially one whose father was forcibly conscripted by the regular German army, the Wehrmacht, and bore scars from fighting on the Eastern Front after Luxembourg’s invasion.

It might also have been taken as a personal slight by Mr Juncker, whose father-in-law was reportedly a Nazi sympathiser.

Cameron also couldn’t resist offering to show him Winston Churchill’s brandy glass, likely a teasing reference to the EU chief’s rumoured weakness for cognac.

This still may all be bluster designed to appease his party’s Europhobic right-wing – like last September when, as the height of the UKIP defection crisis, he said he was willing to recommend leaving the EU if he fails to secure major reforms.

But, as cynical as his tactics might be, his rebellious backbenchers are no doubt a very real concern for him and he will wish to prevent an irreparable Tory fragmentation.

It is likely that Cameron will go down the same path as Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson in 1975 and allow his MPs to freely campaign for whichever side they want.

But if the public narrowly vote to stay in – as 18 of the last 20 polls indicate they will – the majority of Tories in Westminster are going to feel pretty aggrieved, especially if their leader campaigned to stay in the EU.

He will also have to consider how UKIP will respond. Will they be able to galvanise Eurosceptic voters in the same manner as the SNP did with Scottish secessionists after their own refendum failure?

In many ways, remaining in the EU could be a poisoned chalice for the Prime Minister.

If, over the coming months, it becomes clear that Britain could more easily forge a raft of free-trade agreements on its own, that might also persuade Cameron to support, at least tacitly, a Brexit.

For example, his desire for the EU to sign the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership deal with America is at risk because of rising opposition in Germany and other countries amid fears that it could make U.S. multinational firms too powerful.

But, if freed from Brussels, Britain could sign whatever deals it wanted, provided he could win a vote in Commons.

This idea would also resonate with many business leaders, who hitherto had been ardently pro-EU.

Either way, the referendum campaign is going to be a confusing contest and, like me, I suspect quite a few people are going to be re-examining long-held positions on Europe.