Prime minister walks tightrope as he seeks to remain friends with German chancellor and eurosceptic former Tory leader
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David Cameron walks a tightrope as he tries to remain friends with Angela Merkel and the eurosceptic Iain Duncan Smith. Photograph: Tobias Schwarz/Reuters
David Cameron is wise enough to know that even he, an accomplished communicator, cannot please everyone all the time. But there are two people the prime minister is determined to keep on board on the tricky issue of Europe – Iain Duncan Smith and Angela Merkel.
Cameron has made a raw calculation. His job as prime minister will probably become impossible if he falls out with either of them. If Duncan Smith walks out over Europe Cameron would be dealt a devastating, possibly fatal, blow. If Merkel loses confidence in Cameron, the prime minister would find life extremely uncomfortable in the EU. The French president, be it Nicolas Sarkozy or François Hollande, would be ecstatic.
The prime minister is walking a very delicate tightrope as he tries to keep his two friends on board. Sometimes he wobbles and even appears to fall off, though so far a safety net appears to have caught him, as Paul Goodman writes at ConservativeHome today.
Cameron's most difficult moment with Merkel came last month when he vetoed a revision of the Lisbon Treaty to embed the new fiscal framework for the eurozone within the EU's architecture. The prime minister found himself in the awkward position of wielding the British veto for the first time after misreading Merkel.
George Parker and Alex Barker had a riveting account in the FT of what went wrong. Essentially it boiled down to this. Merkel told Cameron shortly before the summit that she wanted to help him and that she did not agree with Sarkozy who wanted to establish a separate treaty outside the EU. Cameron took this as a green light to table quite strong demands on the City. When Merkel realised that the prime minister was seeking Britain's own revision of the Lisbon treaty she fell into Sarkozy's arms.
Since that veto the prime minister has worked hard to repair relations with Merkel who helped ensure Britain was given souped-up observer status on the committee hammering out the eurozone treaty. Cameron has reached out to Merkel by indicating ahead of today's EU summit in Brussels that he will drop his threat to block the use of EU institutions, including the European Court of Justice, to enforce the fiscal compact. It remains to be seen whether Merkel was amused by Cameron's speech in Davos last week in which he effectively said that the euro was not a proper single currency.
Keeping lines open is in the interests of both Cameron and Merkel who meet at today's EU summit in Brussels for the first time since the veto. (They have spoken on the phone since then). Cameron cannot afford to alienate Germany, the most important member of the EU which usually acts as a restraining influence on the protectionist French. Merkel needs Britain to remain a major player to restrain France.
Cameron probably thought his most difficult moment with Duncan Smith came in the late autumn last year. The work and pensions secretary raised concerns about Britain's response to the eurozone crisis and No 10's decision to impose a three line whip on a commons vote on whether to hold a referendum on Britain's membership of the EU. Duncan Smith was famously invited to dinner in No 10 with his cabinet ally, Owen Paterson, to discuss his concerns.
But has the prime minister neglected relations with Duncan Smith since then? The work and pensions secretary appeared to have little idea on the Andrew Marr Show on Sunday that Britain was dropping its objections to the use of EU institutions.
The pressures on Cameron are reminiscent of the difficulties encountered by Sir John Major as prime minister. His life was made hell by eurosceptic Tories who, egged on by Margaret Thatcher, worked behind the scenes with Labour to try and disrupt the Maastricht treaty. One of the most prominent eurosceptics was the newly elected Duncan Smith.
Major tried to work with eurosceptics, though not the rebels, while also keeping lines open to Helmut Kohl, the former German chancellor. * Maastricht, which introduced the single currency, encapsulated Kohl's vision for Europe. His mantle has now been taken over by his protégée, Merkel.
* In today's Independent Mary Ann Sieghart calls for Kohl to be shunned after imposing the euro on all EU member states, bar Britain and Denmark.