DAILY MAIL COMMENT: Can Cameron prove the sceptics wrong?

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Can Cameron renegotiate a fairer deal for the UK in time for the in/out referendum he has promised by November 2017 (if he survives)?

This was the day when the question of Britain’s membership of the European Union – in or out? – was propelled dramatically from the backwaters of debate into the political mainstream.

True, public opinion has been edging towards withdrawal for years, as recent opinion polls (and UKIP’s remarkable performance in last week’s council elections) have so clearly underlined.

But in the upper echelons of the established parties, the very idea that we might be better off outside the EU has been treated as an unmentionable blasphemy. Until now.

Yesterday, Margaret Thatcher’s longest-serving chancellor broke the taboo, becoming by far the most senior Tory to declare that we should pull out.

This paper takes with a pinch of salt Nigel Lawson’s claim that he has changed his mind about our membership because the EU itself has changed beyond recognition since he supported it.

As we argued at the time, Brussels’s drive for a United States of Europe was already crystal clear in the 1980s when he, as steward of our economy, was seeking to link the pound to the German mark – seen by many as a preparation for joining a single European currency.

But Lord Lawson is certainly right that the eurozone bloc increasingly votes against our interests. He is also right to warn of the ‘fundamental contempt for democracy’ at the heart of the ‘bureaucratic monstrosity’ of Brussels.

  More... The Euro charade: The PM may not like it, but Nigel Lawson's absolutely right. The idea that we can renegotiate with the EU is pure fantasy – and voters will never fall for it Cameron is told to act now on Euro referendum or MPs will defect to UKIP It's been a good day, Cameron insists after Thatcher's Chancellor Nigel Lawson called for Britain to quit the EU

Above all, he is right to argue that huge trading opportunities are opening up in the wider world beyond the EU.Indeed, while our terms of membership remain unchanged, the political and economic arguments for withdrawing from the club can only grow more powerful.

The great question is: can David Cameron renegotiate those terms to secure a fairer deal for the UK, in time for the in/out referendum he has promised by November 2017 (if he survives)?

In the most withering section of his article, Lord Lawson claims there’s no hope of securing anything more than ‘inconsequential’ concessions from an EU committed to ever closer integration.

The mammoth task the Prime Minister has set himself is to prove him wrong.

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Peevish, untrustworthy, whining, vacillating… On the third anniversary of the election, Nick Clegg emerges in an appalling light from a first-hand account of the coalition negotiations that followed the indecisive result.

True, Labour’s Lord Adonis has a party axe to grind – and his portrait of a statesmanlike Gordon Brown, concerned only to do the right thing by his Monarch and the British people, may be more flattering than the ex-PM deserves.

But his depiction of the Lib Dem leader, flirting at one moment with Mr Cameron, at the next with Mr Brown – and incapable of being honest with either – rings painfully true to everything the country has learned about this lightweight since.

During those five days of negotiations, this paper contemptuously named Mr Clegg the ‘Madame Fifi of British politics’.

Three years on – after all his broken promises to his own party, his coalition partners and the electorate – we realise we were far, far too kind.God spare us all from a hung parliament in 2015.

No cause to kowtow

AS a furious Chinese leadership threatens trade reprisals, Mr Cameron refuses to apologise for being photographed with the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader.

Good for him. It seems that somewhere in that oh-so-flexible political breast  there lurks a core of principle and national pride.