The unnoticed 2009 decision that pushed the UK to where it is today
David Cameron's decision to ally with the far right at European level went mostly unreported in Britain. But the Tory MEPs warning about the impacts at the time now look like soothsayers.
We’re just a little over two months away from the EU election, and to prepare my reporting I thought it would be useful to go back and look over my notes from the previous elections I covered in 2019, 2014 and 2009. One thing jumped out at me from when I was living in London in 2009. David Cameron, opposition leader at the time, had just taken the decision to remove the Conservative Party from the pan-European centre-right European Peoples Party (EPP) and found a new eurosceptic anti-federalist group called the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR).
It was done because of pressure from the eurosceptic wing of the British Conservative party, spearheaded by Tory MEP Daniel Hannan. Cameron made the promise during his leadership campaign in order to get the votes of that euroskeptic wing, and those votes put him over the top to become head of the party. It was a risky short-term gambit that put his own political career over the long-term future of the UK, a consistent theme of Cameron’s premiership which foreshadowed his fateful Brexit referendum decision six years later. Incredibly, David Cameron (who resigned as prime minister after the 2016 Brexit vote) has just been brought back into the government by Rishi Sunak and is now foreign minister - and is considered the most respectable person in the current government.