Cameron’s changes in Europe are exactly what he promised us

Boris Johnson reminded me of Rab Butler. The Leader of the House of Commons was asked in 1956 by a journalist about Anthony Eden: “Would you say that this is the best Prime Minister we have?” Butler replied: “Yes.”

Johnson, in his beanie hat, was asked a similar question yesterday about David Cameron’s European deal. “The Prime Minister is making the best of a bad job,” he said. It was an ingenious form of words.

It would have been reckless for the Mayor of London to insist that this week’s deal was a good job, in the face of yesterday’s front pages. The Sun and the Daily Mail were particularly hostile. The Sun’s front page, “Who do you think you are kidding Mr Cameron?”, mixed its metaphor, casting the Prime Minister simultaneously as Adolf Hitler and Mr Mainwaring. But its message was unmistakable.

I had previously thought that The Sun and the Mail would huff and puff, but in the end would shy away from urging their readers to vote to leave the EU. Yesterday’s huffing and puffing was so extravagant that this looks less likely. Oddly, The Daily Telegraph – which I had assumed would advocate leaving – was as mild as vegetarian soap yesterday. “The Leave campaign,” it said, “needs to focus now on the bigger picture and explain to instinctively cautious voters how Britain would be better off outside the EU.”

Above all, said the Telegraph, the Leave campaign needs “a top-flight politician, a ‘big beast’ to champion their cause”. Which is why Johnson was being intercepted by a Sky News crew after he finished his cornflakes yesterday. It was why, when he asked a question of the Prime Minister in the Commons later, MPs and journalists paid attention.

But his question was as mild and ambiguous as the Telegraph’s leading article, asking what the deal would do to halt the “flood” of legislation from Brussels. Cameron courteously replied that he was “keen to do even more” to assert the Commons’ sovereignty, which suggested that he might secure further changes in the next two weeks.

Johnson’s game is as transparent as the Westminster bubble: he is posing for the cameras as the more Eurosceptic candidate for the Conservative succession (when compared with George Osborne), but he doesn’t want to lead the Leave campaign because he thinks it is going to lose. The same goes for Theresa May, the Home Secretary, who issued a statement on Tuesday saying the proposals were the “basis for a deal”.

If you want to understand the significance of this week’s deal, listen to the thundering hooves of the deserting big beasts rather than to the shrill wailing of the anti-EU press. Much of what you need to know is contained in the following fact: when the music stops on 19 February, the best-known Conservative MP advocating leaving the EU will be Iain Duncan Smith.

Which surprises and frustrates many of those opposed to Britain’s EU membership, because there are holes in Cameron’s deal big enough to drive a coachload of lawyers through. The most important part of the deal is the requirement for new EU arrivals to pay taxes for four years before claiming in-work benefits. But the document issued by Donald Tusk, the EU President, says workers should gain access to benefits gradually over the four years. It doesn’t say for how long the requirement could be imposed: it would last for “a period of [X] years, extendable for two successive periods of [Y] years and [Z] years”. And it does not guarantee that the British Government can activate the requirement. It says: “The UK would be justified in triggering the mechanism in the full expectation of obtaining approval.” This approval would have to be sought from the EU Council (the leaders of the 28 member states), but also from the European Parliament.

Some of these square brackets will be filled in between now and the summit on 18-19 February, at which a deal looks increasingly likely. But the details are less important than the two rival stories. One is that Cameron has abandoned a lot of promises and settled for a cosmetic deal. I am not sure how true the first part is. A lot of the sweeping changes spoken of when the Prime Minister promised a referendum three years ago were grand but unspecific flourishes. It wasn’t until he set out the in-work benefits changes he wanted, seven months before the election, that the renegotiation became tangible. Those changes may be minor and full of holes but they are real – and they are what Cameron promised.

The other story is that Cameron has secured the objectives he set. The irreconcilable Outers may complain that he must have known from the start that he could obtain the deal that was (nearly) confirmed this week. Well, so he must. He is not stupid. Good negotiators do not demand things that they know they cannot get. But the irreconcilables make the case against themselves: if Cameron’s demands were so modest, they should have mobilised against them at the start of the negotiations, not now the deal is done. That is another reason Johnson and May have been bound to the Prime Minister’s side.

Unless the deal comes apart publicly and embarrassingly in the next two weeks, or at the summit itself, I think it is all over and the referendum is all but won for the Remain campaign.

Of course, there are reasons to doubt the opinion polls. They got the election wrong, and there are big, unexplained differences between phone polls and internet polls on the EU referendum question. But I am most struck by the consistent finding that, if the Prime Minister recommended his renegotiated deal, a large majority would vote for it. People don’t like the EU, but they will hesitate to vote for something Cameron tells them will make them poorer and less secure. This will be the “best of a bad job” referendum.