The Brexit ramp

THE moment had been over two years in the making. Under pressure from his backbenchers, in 2013 David Cameron, the prime minister, had promised that he would reform Britain’s membership of the EU and put the outcome to an in-out referendum if he won another term in office. Fresh from his general election triumph, on June 25th he duly arrived in Brussels to present his wish list to the European Council. But fellow heads of government did not share the prime minister’s sense of occasion. Clashes over Greece and Europe’s migration crisis forced him to shorten his talk to ten minutes. Only Charles Michel, the Belgian premier, deigned to respond to it. Meanwhile François Hollande, France’s president, reportedly nipped to the toilet.

Mr Cameron is attacking on two fronts. One is Brussels, where he seeks concessions to Tory gripes about the EU. His renegotiation aims to make the union more economically liberal and fairer to non-integrationist members like Britain. Yet the summit showed how, with the EU grappling with multiple crises, these demands (however calculatedly modest) are a low priority. The second front is the domestic one, where he seeks to heal his party’s deep divides over Europe and rally most of it behind an “in” vote. There, too, recent events hint at the difficulties ahead.

Critics crowed on June 26th when Downing Street acknowledged that, contrary to his earlier assurances, the prime minister did not expect changes to the EU’s treaties in time for the referendum and would instead seek assurances that these be formalised in the future. Business for Britain, a well-funded lobbying group getting ready to promote an “out” vote in the referendum, seized on the admission, claiming that such assurances would be worthless.

The Greek crisis, too, seems to be emboldening Eurosceptics. In Parliament on June 29th one Tory MP described the euro as a “basket case” and accused Mr Cameron of “faffing about” with a renegotiation doomed to failure. Another cited the chaos in Athens as proof that Britain needed to repatriate powers from Brussels. An editorial on ConservativeHome, an influential website broadly sympathetic to Mr Cameron, argued it made a satisfactory deal almost impossible.

Such sentiments extend all the way up the party. On June 29th Sajid Javid, the business secretary and a leading light in the Eurosceptic younger generation of Tory MPs, chided the Confederation of British Industry, the country’s main business lobby, for its enthusiastically pro-European stance. Boris Johnson, the popular mayor of London, has recently let it be known that he might support an “out” vote in the referendum.

At least on the home front, unlike in Brussels, Mr Cameron has some control over events. The prime minister and his allies have launched a charm offensive, startling backbenchers by phoning them up unannounced to canvas their views, hosting garden parties for MPs at Downing Street and dishing out patronage to biddable Eurosceptics. He will have to keep this up. His perceived haughtiness and indifference to his troops during the last parliament partly caused the noisy anti-EU grousing to which his pledge in 2013 was a panicked riposte. With little luck in Brussels these days, Mr Cameron will have to make his own at home.