David Cameron in a bind

Last week, William Hague, the British Conservative shadow foreign secretary, gave a press conference in Brussels where he restated his leader David Cameron's determination to pull the Conservative members of the European Parliament (EP) out of the European People's Party (EPP).

But this pledge, given by Mr Cameron during the party leadership campaign, has led to much negative coverage in the British press - with reports of unsavoury prospective new allies being sought as well as of Tory division over Europe, which the Conservatives thought they had finally put behind them.

The problem, for Mr Cameron, is that there are no acceptable existing groups that the Conservative MEPs may join, once they leave the EPP. One possibility includes 10 UK Independence Party MEPs - arch-thieves of certain core Tory votes. The alternative is made up of parties that are rural or traditionalist or otherwise ill-fitting with the image of modern, urbane Conservatism that Mr Cameron would like to project.

Conservative isolation would lose EP funds, speaking rights and important committee positions. So a new group needs to be created. Under EP rules, a group needs to have at least 19 members representing between them a minimum of five nation-states.

The prospective allies that Mr Hague has been headhunting, however, are a motley group, united by Euroscepticism and a fringe identity. One is the Polish party in government, which has recently banned gay marches. Another is a French nationalist group, led by an aristocrat. Some of these parties have rejected Mr Hague's advances; others have voiced their concern about other potential group members.

Conservatives who support ditching the EPP have described it as an out-of-date party whose policies would lead to the creation of a European super-state: and therefore incompatible with Toryism. But this assessment of the EPP is a wilful caricature.

The Conservatives, under an arrangement negotiated by Mr Hague himself in 1999, are not members of the EPP but rather allied to them, in a grouping called the EPP-ED. They are not bound by EPP discipline but gain extra funds and disproportionate influence from the alliance. Under the current arrangements, Conservatives can criticise policies they do not like, and more influentially than if they left the group. It should be child's play for a political leader to argue about what the policies really mean.

Thus, it at first seemed to many Conservative opponents of the withdrawal that Mr Cameron would eventually see sense. His two immediate predecessors had both contemplated pulling out and rejected the option.

Since the logical case for the pullout is weak and contradicts Mr Cameron's general strategy of taking the Conservative Party towards the centre ground in domestic politics, it is tempting to blame ideological fervour. But whose? Mr Cameron has shown himself to be ready to revise even the Conservative electoral commitments of less than a year ago - and he wrote the manifesto himself.

The constraining ideological fervour belongs to others. In late December, an editorial in The Daily Telegraph, the Eurosceptic Tory hymn sheet, argued that if Mr Cameron broke his only leadership electoral promise, voters would not consider him trustworthy. This veiled threat of withdrawal of support comes at a time when some right-wing Tories, like Lord Tebbitt and the popular writer Frederick Forsyth, are voicing their concern about Mr Cameron's domestic centrist agenda.

At a time when Mr Blair's credibility is low, and when the Liberal Democrats are also suffering in the polls, Mr Cameron must find it difficult to do anything which would sink his own popularity among the Tory grassroots. He is possibly also willingly persuaded by the idea that his domestic agenda is more important to British voters, and that the domestic can be kept separate from the pan-European.

But the evidence suggests otherwise. Already, Mr Cameron's domestic agenda of social liberalism and inclusivity has been put into question by news of some of the alliances he is exploring in Europe.

He allowed himself to be photographed going to watch the gay western Brokeback Mountain, only to have The Guardian run the headline: "Tories may line up with homophobic Polish party". Mr Cameron is in favour of affirmative action to have more women candidates on the Tory list, but - as The Daily Telegraph's Brussels correspondent pointed out on his Weblog - another of the political parties that Mr Hague had talks with last week is a Dutch Christian fundamentalist group that does not believe women should hold elected office.

There is no reason to think that the domestic and European platforms can be kept apart more easily in the future.

ranierfsadni@europe.com