Little by little, the PM is pulling us away from the EU exit door

It wasn’t a secret that David Cameron secretly wants Britain to stay in the European Union, and it is even less of a secret now. What is significant, though, is that the dogs didn’t bark – although they did growl a bit. The Conservative wolf-pack doesn’t like the EU much (that’s not a secret either), but it is still being coaxed into putting up with it.

At some point, there will come a breach. There will be a moment when Tory MPs and party members will get the flintlocks from the gun cupboard and line up on the In and Out sides and have a proper civil war. But not this week. The Prime Minister’s list of negotiating demands in his letter to Donald Tusk, the EU president, was pretty much what everyone had expected, only better written. So no one had an excuse to say, “Well if that’s all you’re asking for, I stand with Owen Paterson.” Paterson, who was Environment Secretary until last year – and this illuminates a problem for the Better Off Outers – is the highest-ranking Conservative MP who has publicly declared that Britain should leave the EU.

The growling in the Tory dog pound this week was mostly about Cameron’s apparent retreat on denying tax credits and social housing to immigrants from the rest of the EU until they have lived here for four years. He promised in the manifesto that “we will insist” on the four-year period. But in his speech on Tuesday he said he was “open to different ways of dealing with” the question.

The Tory backbenches smelt a sell-out and stirred. Jacob Rees-Mogg gave a pedigree whine, saying sarcastically that it seemed to him that the aim of the Prime Minister’s demands were “to make Harold Wilson’s renegotiation look respectable”. But the outbreak of hostilities was postponed once more.

In fact, I don’t think Cameron has retreated. He has adopted the negotiator’s tactic of saying to the Poles, who fairly enough feel that this restriction is aimed at them: “I understand your problem, and if you can suggest another way of achieving the same objective, I’m all ears.” Given that the objective, to which the Tories are committed in the manifesto, is to “regain control of EU migration”, it is unlikely that the central Europeans will come up with anything that Cameron could sell to his party and a sceptical public.

At which point, the eastern EU countries have to decide whether or not to call the UK’s bluff. They don’t want Britain to leave, and they know that Cameron secretly wants to keep Britain in the EU, but they also know that British public opinion is, like public opinion everywhere, touchy and unpredictable. The Prime Minister may not be threatening to walk away from the negotiations, but the British people cannot be taken for granted and simply by announcing a referendum Cameron has given himself negotiating leverage.

I shouldn’t tell the easterners, then, that Cameron has a back-up plan if they fail to agree. If he cannot get the unanimous support of other EU countries for the four-year waiting period, there is a way he could bring in the change without needing a change in EU law. It would mean making tax credits and social housing conditional on four years of National Insurance contributions. That would avoid discriminating between British and other EU nationals, although it would also mean that British workers under the age of 23 would also be ineligible for tax credits.

For those reasons, then, I think Cameron will get most of what he wants. These are not trivial changes. They require legally binding promises of changes to EU founding treaties. Yet their effects will be modest. Withdrawal of tax credits would make work in the UK marginally less attractive, although the higher minimum wage pushes in the opposite direction, and the UK jobs miracle is still a powerful magnet, as yesterday’s record employment figures showed.

It is now almost too late for the Better Off Outers to complain. The ones who know what they are talking about realise that Cameron’s demands were never going to satisfy the many people who believe a sovereign nation should be able to decide who should live in it. They – people such as Daniel Hannan, the Tory MEP – understand that, to escape the rules on free movement of workers, it would be no good being like Norway or Switzerland: subject to EU rules but with no say over them.

But, when we get to the point, possibly early next year, when Cameron completes his negotiations and declares triumphantly that he has got everything he set out to get – “game, set and match” – then it will be too late for Tory MPs to say that his demands were too small.

As with the Scottish referendum and the general election, the Prime Minister is playing an uphill game with some skill. He has kept his party on his side through constructive ambiguity, and he has prevented any of his cabinet ministers from making a break for the antis. Theresa May, who understands the politics of immigration best of all, is still waiting and seeing. Iain Duncan Smith is too transfixed by the mirage of universal credit. And Boris Johnson – a member of the political cabinet if not the real thing – calculates that his chances of the top job are better if he avoids backing the losing side in a referendum.

When the Tory civil war finally breaks out over Europe, the antis will find they have no leaders and hardly any media supporters. This week the Prime Minister took another grandmother’s footstep away from the exit door without his party turning on him.