The Cameroons take on a Europe of and for the people

IT hasn't taken David Cameroon too long to rile Europe's political elite. He's sent William Hague over to Brussels to tell our chums in the European Parliament that the Tories want nothing more to do with the Christian Democrats and that they're off to forge alliances with political parties from the new EU states east of the Elbe.

In the great scheme of things, it doens't matter a jot to Doris and Dorothy, as hold hands on the top of the Clacton ominbus, where the Conservative Party sits in the European Parliament. If our two passenger, or the vast majority of the British people, ever think about the EP, then it will be in negative terms and so who the Tories cosy up to is of no consequence at all.

But to the political classes, it is a debate of the deepest significanc that the Tories fancy their chances with the Poles and the Czechs. They're jettisoning their tradtional Christian Democrat allies, the grand coalition of the European People's Party and European Democrats, because this fine body of men and women are nothing but federalists and integrationists, who love their new euro notes and want a Constitution for a Europe fit for the 21st century.

Tory MEPs are by no means united over new party leader David Cameron's desire to pull his troops out of the EPP-ED. And it means that every time Europe or the future of the Tories is raised at Westminster, he can get in a cheap shot at the Cameroons opposite.

The Tories can't get any more isolated in Europe than they are at the moment, so moving seats in the glass and aluminium halls of Brussels and Strasbourg seems little more than cosmetics. Healthy Euroscepticsm is a world apart from where the Tories stand, who seem more worried about the UK Independence Party than they are about making Europe work.

UKIP's aim is to obstruct the EU and bring the whole edifice down aso that decision making can be returned to Westminster. Many in the Conservative share that desire and see Cameron's attack on Christian Democracy as the start of the great withdrawal process.

I may be being unfair to the Cameroons - but making Willam Hague, the man who coined that inane and meaningless phrase "in Europe, not run by Europe" the shadow foreign secretary, has emboldened the quitters in a party which, from Churchill to Heath, was once the champion of the European ideal.