If it were not funny, it would be tragic. The UK Conservative party’s decision to quit the European People’s Party (EPP), the main centre-right political group in the European Parliament, is backfiring on the Tories in spectacular fashion. The decision was always daft – a bit like the right wing of the US Republican Party splitting off and forming a minority group in Congress – but it now looks more short-sighted than ever.
On Tuesday the Tories relinquished the leadership of their new “anti-federalist” faction, the so-called European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group, to Michal Tomasz Kaminski, a Polish politician. They felt obliged to do so after Edward McMillan-Scott, a Tory MEP, refused to respect a deal in which Kaminski had been promised one of the parliament’s prestigious vice-presidency posts.
McMillan-Scott, who instead secured the vice-presidency for himself, has now effectively been kicked out of the ECR, and the Tories are being led by a Pole. This, to put it mildly, was not in David Cameron’s script when he led his party out of the mainstream EPP group.
There are, in any case, serious doubts over how effective the ECR will be over the legislature’s five-year term. To meet the requirement that an officially recognised faction should have at least 25 MEPs from seven countries, the ECR has been cobbled together out of 26 Tories, 15 Poles, nine Czechs and a solitary politician each from Belgium, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania and the Netherlands (a Finn was also supposed to be in, but dropped out a couple of weeks ago). The Tories are bound to spend half their time nursing the egos of the last five individuals, any two of whom could destroy the group by leaving it.
This, however, is far from the whole story. Perhaps the most important development this week has been the decision of the EPP, the centre-left and the centrist liberals – the assembly’s three largest groups – to form a broad ”pro-European bloc”. This will reinforce the marginalisation of the Tories, who will find themselves on the fringes of the legislature in the company of French communists, assorted Greens, anti-Islamic populists and extreme rightists such as the British National Party.
And what have the Tories got in exchange? Well, Malcolm Harbour, a Tory MEP, will chair the parliament’s internal market committee. Otherwise, it’s a grand old mess, unworthy of one of the world’s great political parties.
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