Instead, the Leave side have used up today complaining about Cameron not playing fair. In particular, they have been complaining about Cameron being in a secret unfair stitch-up months ago with big business.
The Vote Leave campaign has accused Cameron of being ‘knee deep in a conspiracy’ to keep Britain in the EU, after letters emerged indicating the Prime Minister discussed the role FTSE 100 companies could play in the Remain campaign.
These letters were exchanged before Cameron had even completed his renegotiation deal with European leaders. Yet at that time the Prime Minister was still claiming he ‘ruled nothing out,’ leading eurosceptic MPs and others to believe he might be willing to support a campaign to leave if he won few concessions from Brussels in his negotiations.
This is all ‘unfair,’ the Leave campaign says.
Indeed, Nigel Farage said today that Cameron’s whole campaign has been so unfair that he wants a second referendum if the result is only a slim majority in favour of Remain.
This kind of complaint is worse than useless, it is embarrassing.
Anyone over the age of six who squeals, ‘He’s not playing fair!’ is absurd.
Of course Cameron is not playing fair. Of course he has been involved in secret dealings with big business. He is a politician who intends to win, and he has form for exactly this kind of behaviour.
I therefore have no time for Tories such as the MP Jacob Rees-Mogg who is reported today to be ‘furious’ over Cameron’s secret FTSE dealings.
Rees-Mogg told the Bruges Group in London that Cameron’s secret Remain dealings with the big corporations while he still worked to make people believe he might support Britain leaving the EU was ‘a scandal of the highest order.’ He said it appeared Parliament had been misled by Cameron.
Yet Rees-Mogg is a member of a party that was happy to go on backing Cameron even after he betrayed his ‘cast-iron guarantee’ to give the British people a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.
That betrayal was in 2009. Cameron was a weasel then; he is a weasel now. It is no good for Leave campaigners such as Rees-Mogg to act as if they have only just realised it.
If the slippery manoeuvre in 2009 wasn’t enough, any politician of any experience would have recognised a weasel manoeuvre in Cameron’s refusal to talk straight and say he might back Leave if he failed in his negotiations.
Instead of straight talk, all the Prime Minister would say was ‘I rule nothing out.’ It is especially amazing that Rees-Mogg, a well-educated Roman Catholic, didn’t identify that Cameron phrase as pure Jesuit.
The Leave campaign needs to stop whining that the campaign is ‘unfair,’ because of course it is.
However, Cameron is winning this referendum not because he is slippery, he is winning it because the official Leave campaign has described no clear, safe path out of the EU for the voters.
In other words, Cameron is not winning this campaign. The Leave campaign is losing it by being unthinking, uninformed, and unorganised.
Another recruit to the Everyone Else Is Wrong tendency, then.
ReplyDeleteThere was of course, one distinct reason why he was given the benefit of the doubt over Lisbon - once Lisbon was ratified it then became the TFEU, so a vote to reject Lisbon then became a vote to reject the whole treaty. At the time, and in the position we were in it was thought to be a constitutional headache that we could all do without. Plus there was the Lib Dems, without whom he would have had no government.
ReplyDeleteBut undoubtedly, since the Bloomberg speech, the mask has dropped and nobody believes any more that he would have failed to ratify Lisbon had he been in place at the time. He's a fully paid up federalist club member, as has been every leader of this country bar Thatcher for 50 years.
It is hard work for genuine leave campaigners having to not only battle Cameron & The Establishment but Vote Leave as well. Given Cameron's empty cupboard this should be an easy win if only Vote Leave actually had a plan.
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