David Cameron with president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker. Flickr/Number 10. Some rights reserved.
The outcome of the British government’s attempt to renegotiate the UK’s terms of membership of the European Union and the referendum that will follow is highly uncertain but the renegotiation reveals quite a lot about David Cameron.
For a start, the decision to renegotiate relates much less to the UK’s interests than it does to Cameron’s inability to modernise his own party and face down its increasingly vocal right wing. He now spends most of his time talking about and dealing with the last issue he said he wanted his party to talk about when he became leader of the Conservative Party more than a decade ago. More importantly, the way in which he is going about a crucial part of this renegotiation reveals that – far from what one would expect from a self-proclaimed moderniser – key policy decisions pay little heed to evidence.
