LONDON (Reuters) – When Prime Minister David Cameron sealed a deal designed to keep Britain in the European Union after two days of talks in Brussels, his relief was short-lived.
Within hours of Friday’s agreement, one of Cameron’s closest allies, Justice Secretary Michael Gove, and five other ministers declared they would campaign against him in a June 23 referendum on whether Britain should stay in the bloc.
It was the first blow in what could be a new “civil war” in Cameron’s Conservative Party over Europe. Divisions over Britain’s place in Europe contributed to the downfall of two of his predecessors, John Major and Margaret Thatcher.
It is a war Cameron tried hard to avoid when he came to power in 2010. The following year he ordered his party in the strictest terms to vote down a bill suggesting a referendum on membership of the EU, saying it was the “wrong answer for Britain”.
But within two years, he had changed his mind, paving the way to a membership referendum, by declaring: “I believe in confronting this issue – shaping it, leading the debate. Not simply hoping a difficult situation will go away.”
Cameron, 49, now finds himself fighting a referendum which will determine Britain’s future in world affairs and shape the future EU – Britain is the bloc’s second-largest economy and one of its two main military powers.
In a quirk of the British political system, the prime minister is in the unusual position of being more sure of the backing of the opposition Labour Party than of his own party.
“He didn’t want a referendum, he was bounced into doing it,” said Douglas Carswell, a Conservative Party member until he defected to the eurosceptic UK Independence Party (UKIP) in 2014. “He’s been the actor in this production, he is not writing the script, or directing it, or producing it.”
As a eurosceptic, Carswell has an axe to grind, but his view that Cameron has almost slept walk into such a crucial referendum is shared by some of the prime minister’s allies and supporters as well as other critics.
“I think it’s pretty clear … there was no plan,” said Jonathan Portes, principal research fellow at the National Institute of Eco-nomic and Social Research who specialises in immigration issues.
The deal reached on Friday followed weeks of negotiations across Europe in which Cameron tried to win better terms for Britain if it remains in the EU, hoping to win over sceptical voters including many in his own party.
He said he had won his country a “special status” from the agreement, which excludes Britain from the founding goal of “ever closer union” and hands the government welfare curbs to try to tackle concerns over high levels of migration.
A spokesman for Cameron said the prime minister had always focus-ed on winning “the best deal for the British people” and denied the negotiations had been about “party management”.
But Cameron’s path to the referendum shows he is clearly sensitive to the opinions in his party.
He initially steered clear of discussing the EU with party eurosceptics after coming to power and avoided meetings with them, and to reduce their hold, portrayed them “as a crackpot minority banging on about Europe”, one Conservative lawmaker said.
Allies say Cameron knew he had to counter the threat of rebellion and took a calculated risk by calling a referendum he expects to win.
But as the prime minister tried to ignore the issue, Britain’s largely eurosceptic press kept the issue alive.
Over decades Britain’s press has fuelled suspicion of a bloc praised by many Europeans for ensuring peace after World War Two, but derided in Britain for wanting to ban curved bananas and rename sausages.
