I don't dispute the analysis but your conclusion's rubbish. Enough said! Someone send you a white feather. The purpose of politics and the whole point of the FCO is or more properly should be to get us out from under. Junk the 20th century with its 100 yrs of failure and mistake and realign our industry, our science our education and our foreign policy. You lack the will but that doesn't mean nothing can be done. it just means you and your fellow travellers can't do it.

Two who cares? and a so what? from me

The Party's master strategist has found a strategy that works - all his own idea and all new - and is applying it with all the zeal of the convert. Better late than never, I suppose.

Iran is much more likely to have been behind 9/11 than Iraq.. ..But less likely than Haliburton.

Apparently, it all goes back to the time when the FCO had again been completely outclassed by the French in some negotiation and the despairing Foreign Secretary yelled out "Why cant you lot be more like the Quai d'Orsay". Only the mandarins misunderstood and ever since the FCO has slavishly done whatever was in the best interests of France.

If Ireland wants to leave the Euro all its debts would be denominated in Euros and its new Punt would be very heavily discounted. It might therefore be in favour of accepting the Pound as its currency as that would be harder and cause less increase in its debt burden. It could use the pound in the same way that the Carribean now or Russia in the Nineties accepted the dollar as its de facto currency without any formal union that would be a further blow to its pride. But I suspect that the whole point of withdrawal would be to default on the debt burden

I hope Cameron cannot fail to have seen the complete change in national mood over the last 48 hours and thinks upon it. I think there is no doubt that he didn't intend this result but having got it, he should be thinking very hard, whether the old lady's counsel he has been fed by the FCO, the BBC and his CCHQ advisers has been just plain wrong. I have argued for two years or more that Cameron is going to need a second front to fight when the economy gets really tough and that the EU is the obvious candidate. That is the politics but the statesmanship must be the realisation that when push comes to shove there is no way that the British economy can afford to permit the French attack on the City and that now that the 23+3 have separated themselves, to continue in a shadow 27 EU when all the business is occuring elsewhere is the worst of all possible worlds. We will be bound by rules and paying costs we have no means to influence, let alone control. *If* the 26 continue as such, then we have no choice but to leave and follow an EFTA route. We have already left, we just haven't reset the satnav. All the evidence of the Press and polls is that this Plan B will be electorally popular. Take the £19b service charge for the EU and turn it in March into 4p off income tax and then hold an election in May. There is another way. There is a Plan B. And now we have little choice anyway. If the City decamps to Geneva because Cameron backs down then that's 8p+ on income tax. There is now no choice but to take the other choice. I will even pretend it was his strategy all along.

To return this thread to the subject of Diplomacy. When are we going to discuss the performance of our own dear quisling Foreign Office. Assuming that Cameron didn't all along intend to use this as an excuse to leave the EU, which is just conceivable but surely nonsense, the FCO have been incompetent even by their own low standard. Where was the discussion with Sweden Hungary and Poland before the summit. What inducements did these countries, with their vivid memories of a powerful Germany, need to go along with this German power grab? If we weren't going to buckle what have the FCO been doing to ensure we weren't quite so publicly isolated? Cameron must now appeal over the heads of their governments to the peoples of Europe. "Here we are -ready to talk. Send us your (new) leaders when you decide that restoring Germany to its 1940 borders is no longer tolerable."

I thought the power to hold a snap election unless 2/3 of the commons want one had been lost. No way Labour or the L/Ds are going to agree to that.

Isaiah 53:6 - well it is Christmas and Handel is very lovely

If Cameron neither negotiates repatration of powers nor grants a referendum should he resign?

Which of these possibly repatriated powers would be sufficient for you to be prepared to want Britain to remain a member of the EU in its current form. None would be sufficient Fisheries Working Time Directive CAP ECHR etc etc None would be required, I am a federast/Riccardo's Ghost.

To list these by preference

If you are sure a referendum would pass then hold it and be safe. But you're not, are you?

Look, He's behind you - ....Politics as pantomime for Christmas

Merkozy want a treaty involving the 27 nations. If it involves Britain would that require a referendum?

If the ECJ can fine countries running a deficit greater than 3% of GDP is that a transfer of power to the EU or not?

If the ECJ can fine a country with a budget deficit greater than 3% would that constitute transfering power to the the EU?

He's not asking for a veto on other countries but on ours.

At last! But in order for the straw to break your back you have to have a spine. You and others need to go before Christmas to do a deal in January for the Euros in May and then take UKIP's percentage in that into the GE 2015 as the economy deteriorates. UKIP is a fringe party; the two party system keeps it down until it achieves breakthrough then the political situation flips like Labour in the 20s. The only breakthrough is May 2012. You and the others must go in good time for that. Do you want to write British History or be a footnote in Whittakers? Vertebrate or invertebrate? Statesman or cannon fodder?

They didn't want Cameron, did they though, even when the choice was Brown. Have you worked out what went wrong yet?

You're the editor Tim, where shall we have a leadership debate?

Agreed Cometh the hour, cometh the man. The entire political edifice is rotten: it just requires the merest puff of protest from the right quarter for it to fall down. Nothing to lose and a Kingdom to gain. Literally.

I seriously do not get this "whips" argument. This ludicrous belief that it does not matter if we head to perdition, so long as we all do as the idiot in charge says we should. You have the mind of a corporal. The purpose of politics is not to support a Party, it is to produce policies and to enact laws that help one's country. Party loyalty is one mechanism that makes more likely the enacting of laws from policies. I don't disagree. But your bathetic determination that it is all that is necessary, worse that it is sufficient, has been comprehensively disproved throughout the 20th century and especially in the period 1992-1997. There is a duty on leadership to be right, it is the corollary of the duty of loyalty in the troops. If you consider the state of Britain in 2011 against its state in 1911 it is obvious that this country's politicians have pursued an 100 years of sustained error. No idea or policy of the twentieth century was correct. Major's euro enthusiasm did not even have the grace of personal conviction, the Conservatives were a group of Gadarene swine, driven mad by the demons of Clarke and Heseltine and driven over the cliffs of 1997 by corporals with mentalities like you. What can one do but protest?

Tendentious or what. The Eurosceptics were right; the rest of the Conservative Party led by Major, Clarke and Hesletine were wrong. Fundamentally, terminally, humiliatingly wrong. It was Major who lost the election and allowed the economy to be trashed because no one believed him ever again after Black Wednesday. All the Tory Mps who refused to kick him out in 2005 proved that there was "no change, no chance". Many of them paid the price in 2007 and we all continue to pay it ever since. You and your fellow euroenthusiasts have been more comprehensively proved to be dangerously, deludedly wrong than anyone since the Soviet Politburo.