Cameron is under pressure to nuance that promise

Less than two weeks after being elected leader of the British Conservative Party, David Cameron is facing adversity. The only concrete campaign promise he made during the leadership election was to pull the Tory MEP group out of the European People's Party (EPP). Now this promise is taking on a poisonous life of its own.

One of the lessons the Tories have learned from the Blair era is that media stories about intra-party conflict should be snuffed out as quickly as possible. Yet, since last week, the promise has been attracting increasing media attention. The Guardian, the Independent, and, particularly, the Financial Times have covered the mutterings from several of the Tory MEPs, the hostility of big Tory politicians like Douglas Hurd and Kenneth Clarke, and the warnings from the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the French presidential hopeful, Nicolas Sarkozy.

It might be pointed out that Europhiles like Lord Hurd and Mr Clarke are ideologically marginal in today's Tory party. They are. That is why the conventional wisdom is that the pressure on Mr Cameron to keep his promise is great while the pressure to find a way out is weak. But the political truth is the reverse, to go by recent conversations I have had with various Tories.

To begin, why is the pressure to keep the promise weak? First, because the promise itself - remember, the only specific promise made by a candidate who otherwise doggedly resisted making specific programmatic pledges - was made in a moment of weakness. Early in the leadership campaign, Mr Cameron lagged behind the three frontrunners and his overall concern was to avoid going out in the first round of balloting. He made the promise to win the votes of three Europhobe MPs. No one else demanded it of him.

The promise is also argumentatively weak, as Mr Cameron knows as well as anyone but the Europhobes. The Tory far right calls for it because the EPP is Euro-integrationist whereas the Conservative Party is not and because the Tory MEPs have sometimes taken positions at variance with those of their national party. However, in fact the Tories are not members of the EPP (whose members, in any case, have diverse and diverging ideas about European integration). They are members of the group of European Democrats (ED), who are formally allied to the EPP.

The alliance gives Tory MEPs an influence on European legislation affecting British business that they otherwise would not have, including a vice president of the Parliament and chairmanship of five out of 20 parliamentary committees. The alliance also gives them the right to vote against the rest of the EPP. If sometimes Tory MEPs diverge from the positions of the national party, it is because the trade-offs of parliamentary politics call for it - but these wobbles would persist in any alliance the Tories join.

Next, why is the pressure to find a way out of the promise strong? There is, first, the opposition from within a majority of the MEP group. Just when Mr Cameron was elected leader, the Tory MEPs had their own group elections: across the board, the moderate candidates, committed to staying within the EPP-ED group, won office with a proportion of 18:7 of the votes. Between seven to 10 MEPs are said to be committed to staying within the EPP-ED group no matter what.

On their own, MEPs do not carry great weight within Tory politics. On this issue, however, they can continue to leak to the media with considerable damage. With the election of Mr Cameron, the Tories thought they had finally put the issue of inner divisions and dogma over Europe behind them. Persistent anti-Cameron briefings from Brussels would keep those issues alive. Combined with cold shoulders from should-be allies like Ms Merkel and Mr Sarkozy, they could leave Mr Cameron looking not fresh, pragmatic and centrist, as he would like to look, but Eurosceptic, right-wing and dogmatic - making him vulnerable to Labour charges that the Tories have not changed at all.

No one understands this better than some of the key people that Mr Cameron has gathered around him: William Hague, Francis Maude and Andrew Lansley. Although they publicly still have a right-wing reputation, in internal party discussions and debates they have shown that they have travelled a considerable way towards the centre (another key lesson gathered from the Blair years).

They do not want to see more media attention given to party rifts. Snubs from EPP leaders could make young Mr Cameron look more like a student leader striking poses than a potential Prime Minister. Especially since the charges would include a deadly one: losing influence beneficial for British business for purely ideological reasons.

Mr Hague's position is particularly interesting. It was under his leadership that the Conservative Party engineered membership of the EPP-ED group back in 1999. Nothing has happened since then to make him change his mind about the usefulness of the alliance.

Mr Hague is now in charge of overseeing the redefinition of the Tory MEP group. In this appointment we might see, speculatively, the way in which Mr Cameron hopes to address his problem promise: by "nuancing" it.

Who better than Mr Hague to say that the Tory MEPs are not really part of the EPP, as such? And who better to use the contacts he made to set up the ED to redefine that group in such a way as to show that the promise had been kept?

Arguably the nuancing has already begun, with Mr Hague telling the Today radio programme, last week, that the matter would take several months to settle. It need not take several months to pull out the Tory MEPs. What takes several months is fixing the problem.

Whether the EPP would go along with a fix is an open question but the Tory MEPs would be keen to resolve the issue by giving their leader a face-saving device. Mr Cameron could wait to settle scores with the rebel leaders once the time for their re-selection as European Parliament candidates comes around in 2009. Since that is also likely to be a British general election year, which could see Mr Cameron lose his leadership of the party, rebel MEPs are probably willing to take their chances.

ranierfsadni@europe.com