Why Cameron might soon regret asking his EU buddies for help

One of the things that worried David Cameron as he started out on his campaign for Britain to stay in the European Union was that he would not be able to find enough ministers who would be really enthusiastic about helping him make his case to voters. He seems to have succeeded far better than he imagined, signing up not only the bulk of his own Cabinet to his cause, but also ministers from governments in other countries.

This week, French Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron joined the Remain campaign with a forceful warning that the Jungle migrant camp in Calais would move to Britain if it left the EU. “The day this relationship unravels, migrants will no longer be in Calais,” he warned in an interview with the Financial Times. The whole thing had a clever symmetry: on the same day that David Cameron visited France for a summit and met German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the papers were full of warnings from a French minister and a German car manufacturer – with BMW telling staff that they might lose their jobs if Britain left the EU. It was almost as though a media planning grid had been involved.

Out campaign Vote Leave called the warning “ludicrous” and said it “smacks of desperation from the UK government”. Why would the French rip up bilateral deals on border controls that did not come about as a result of Britain’s EU membership anyway, the group asked. And besides, is Macron really the best informed person on this matter? He loves impressing the British media, but his own colleagues disagree with his warning: interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve has previously said that ending the agreement was “a foolhardy path, and one the government will not pursue”.

The reason the In crowd might want the French Economy Minister making these sorts of comments is that they force the Brexit campaigners to confront exactly what sort of arrangement they would want for Britain to have if it did leave. And those campaigners do not agree.

Some, such as Ukip’s Douglas Carswell, want Britain to be an outward-looking, open country when it comes to immigration. Others want to use Brexit to drive down immigration. Rather awkwardly, this second camp includes Carswell’s own party leader, Nigel Farage, but there are also splits between the Conservative members of the Out camp on this, too, and certainly between the Conservative and Labour sides.

This means that Vote Leave is unlikely to advocate one set model of Brexit. Instead, its campaigners are referring people to a basic outline of what a post-EU Britain might look like, which says little more than “We’ll take back control of migration policy, including the 1951 UN convention on refugees, and we’ll decide who comes into our country, on what terms, and who is removed.” To be more specific would be to risk even more arguments within the Brexit campaign than already exist.

The strangest thing about a minister from another country’s government getting involved at all is that he has intervened on a matter that doesn’t really benefit the In campaign. Unheeded, Macron also promised a “red carpet” for bankers fleeing the City of London in the event of a Brexit, and this warning does play to Remain’s strongest suit: the economy. Migration, by contrast, is a topic Downing Street wants to avoid talking about too much before 23 June; it only benefits the Outers.

Even if there were not regular stories on the evening news bulletins about desperate migrants using home-made battering rams to break down border fences, talking about immigration would not help the Remain bunch all that much. David Cameron’s decision to stick to his back-of-a-fag-packet promise to drive net migration down into the “tens of thousands”, and his inability to secure anything from European leaders that will enable him to meet that silly pledge means that, whenever he or any other Remain campaigner talks about immigration, they are reminding voters of how little control over it Britain has. Had Cameron never come up with the net migration target – had he never made such a fuss about the importance of his “emergency brake” on in-work benefits for EU migrants – things might have been a little easier.

Perhaps these warnings are designed to trigger an emotional response in voters as well, making them fear the “leap in the dark” that David Cameron repeatedly refers to when he makes the case against Brexit. He wants a campaign that is about the stability of sticking with the European Union, rather than the likely chaos wrought by leaving.

But Tory MPs campaigning for Out think the Prime Minister has miscalculated by focusing so much on a campaign of fear. “It is fast becoming Project Noise,” says one Eurosceptic Conservative. “And that means people just hear warning after warning after warning and stop listening at all.”

Those who do keep listening may hear the curious sound of Labour politicians, such as Yvette Cooper, agreeing word for word, even with the ludicrous warnings from Cameron and his friends from other governments, about the chances of a “Jungle” in Kent. Some Labour MPs worry that this will damage the party’s identity, making it sound to their voters as though they are too close to the Tories. Others take a more optimistic approach – or at least an optimistic one given their party’s current miserable plight: Labour is now so irrelevant that no one will notice what people like Yvette Cooper are saying anyway.

Perhaps as the campaign wears on, with the migration crisis rumbling away alongside throughout, Cameron will wish fewer people had heard of Emmanuel Macron, too.