David Cameron was defeated over Juncker and yet his MPs still cheer

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/30/david-cameron-juncker-mps-european-strategy

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The generous interpretation of David Cameron's European strategy is that it is failing. A rival view is that David Cameron no longer has a European strategy. The prime minister's stated ambition – set out in his January 2013 Bloomberg speech – is to renew Britain's EU membership with a referendum in 2017, having negotiated new terms that will be palatable to a majority of the country and the Conservative party. It is clear from the display of frenzied revelling in national isolation on display by Tory MPs in parliament that no such compromise exists.

The prime minister had practical reasons for opposing the candidacy of Jean-Claude Juncker as president of the European commission and a principled case against the process that led to Juncker's nomination. He had the support of Labour and Liberal Democrat parties in seeking an alternative. He also manifestly failed to achieve his objective thanks to a combination of short-term diplomatic ineptitude (making the case against the former prime minister of Luxembourg too personal) and longer-term negligence (lacking the interest or capacity to build continental alliances).

Cameron presented his abject defeat to parliament today and yet his MPs cheered with vigour usually reserved for unalloyed triumph. Ed Miliband catalogued the depth of the prime minister's humiliation; the Conservative party wallowed in it. The reason for Tory gratification is not hard to decode. Cameron's inability to negotiate a deal over the Juncker candidacy in recent months prefigures the difficulty he will have negotiating an EU reform package that can credibly be sold as repatriation of powers from Brussels. The posture of solitary Eurosceptic martyrdom – very well alone! – that the prime minister has been forced to assume in compensation for his inability to bring home a victory is a rehearsal for the line many Tories want him to take with regard to the referendum he has pledged.

Tory MPs were not cheering the outcome of the summit because it reflected glory on Cameron; they were cheering because it reinforced a view many of them have that Britain's relations with the European Union are drifting into a condition of detachment that ends with exit. They also know – because every precedent tells them – that their leader can be chivvied, nudged and bullied into ever greater degrees of hostility to the European project; that they can continue raising the price of their loyalty in denominations of anti-Brussels rhetoric and the prime minister will keep paying.

While Conservative backbenchers feasted on the carcass of their party's pragmatic engagement with Brussels, the Lib Dem frontbenches were conspicuously vacant. Nick Clegg, an ardent Europhile, would surely have found it hard to disagree with much or indeed any of what Miliband said in his attack on Cameron. So the most he could do in the interests of coalition solidarity was to be elsewhere.

The renegotiation-and-referendum path is not, after all, coalition policy. It is an aspiration for the Tories to be enacted only in the event that Cameron returns to Downing Street after next May's general election. Yet the ostensible purpose of the occasion was a report on the outcome of a European summit by the prime minister not in his capacity as leader of some putative Tory administration but as head of the current UK government. Except the government doesn't have a European policy. It has an agreement to disagree. And the prime minister doesn't have a European strategy beyond deferring the moment he must displease his party.