Lord Howe, the former Conservative chancellor who triggered the downfall of Margaret Thatcher, has launched a scathing attack on the prime minister, accusing him of running scared of his backbenchers and endangering Britain's future in Europe.
The Tory grandee says David Cameron has opened a Pandora's box by opposing the current terms of the UK's membership of the European Union and now appears to be losing control of his party. The prime minister's actions, Howe writes in the Observer, have turned an internal Tory problem into a national one.
In a highly significant intervention over Britain's future, Howe laments the "new, almost farcical" level of debate over Europe in the Tory party, and says that Labour and the Liberal Democrats may need to bear the burden of retrieving the situation. Howe, Thatcher's longest-serving cabinet minister, whose resignation speech in 1990 is widely considered to have precipitated the then prime minister's downfall, writes: "Sadly, by making it clear in January that he opposes the current terms of UK membership of the EU, the prime minister has opened a Pandora's box politically and seems to be losing control of his party in the process.
"The ratchet-effect of Euroscepticism has now gone so far that the Conservative leadership is in effect running scared of its own backbenchers, let alone Ukip, having allowed deep anti-Europeanism to infect the very soul of the party."
Howe, who was also a former foreign secretary and deputy prime minister under the late Baroness Thatcher, adds that the events of recent days, in which the prime minister has been forced to offer more and more to satisfy his Eurosceptic MPs, were "more like the politics of the French Fourth Republic than the serious practice of government". » | Daniel Boffey, policy editor | Saturday, May 18, 2013
