27 October 2009: Times
By Tom Baldwin, Chief Reporter
Lord Heseltine, the former Deputy Prime Minister, predicts that Mr Cameron will have to rejoin the European People’s Party (EPP) soon after the election. He is understood to have warned the party leadership at a private meeting last week that its currently Eurosceptic stance would be deeply damaging to Britain’s foreign policy interests. He suggested that the Conservative leader would inevitably have to “reach an accommodation” with the EPP — even though that would be extremely difficult to achieve without losing face and enraging party activists.
Earlier this year the party fulfilled a pledge made during Mr Cameron’s campaign for the leadership by severing ties with the mainstream, but federalist, EPP in the European Parliament. Instead, he has formed a new alliance with mainly east European rightwingers, who have been repeatedly accused of anti-Semitism and extremism. They include Michal Kaminski, of Poland’s Law and Justice party, and Robert Zile, of the Latvian party For Fatherland and Freedom.
This has alienated important allies in Europe, such as Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, and President Sarkozy of France. Berlin and Paris have been dismayed further by Conservative opposition to the Lisbon treaty, as well as signals from Mr Cameron that he would still seek to repatriate powers from existing agreements even if the treaty were ratified before the election.
As The Times disclosed last week, Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, has also expressed alarm that a rupture in relations between a future Tory government and Europe would diminish Britain’s ability to wield influence in world affairs.
Lord Heseltine, contacted last night, did not deny suggesting that his party had got itself into a “sticky situation” on Europe. He said his comments last week had been intended as private, adding: “My views are well known but you won’t get a quote out of me that might damage my party.”
Having resigned from the Thatcher Cabinet in 1986 during the Westland crisis — which revolved around his preference for the helicopter company to be integrated with French and Italian defence manufacturers — Lord Heseltine knows how incendiary the issue of Europe can be for Conservative governments. For more than a decade afterwards, in and out of office, he was at the fulcrum of a battle against Euroscepticism that caused carnage within the party.
Kenneth Clarke, one of his allies in that fight, was brought back into Mr Cameron’s top team to lend it greater weight and experience. The Shadow Business Secretary accepts that party policy on Europe is settled and has been told that the only way he could campaign for a “yes” vote in a referendum on the treaty would be to resign.
David Miliband sought to capitalise on fresh tension among the Conservatives over Europe by declaring that any government pursuing a foreign policy “lost in hubris, nostalgia or xenophobia” would have to “watch our influence in the world wane”. The Foreign Secretary said that Tory plans to repatriate powers were based on a deception that “you can hate Europe as it exists today and remain central to European policymaking”.
