Here is what the Express says is the text of a strange letter from PM David Cameron’s political private secretary Laurence Mann to a ‘Conservative activist’ (that one seems like a contradiction in terms, but never mind) on the subject of the UK’s membership of the European Union and why an In/Out referendum might be, ahem, unhelpfu.

This looks like an authentic text – it carries the obligatory clumsy typo without which no letter from a senior politician’s office these days is meaningful.

Thus:

There is also one argument, in particular, against holding such a referendum that we find irrefutably powerful, namely that most people in our country want to say neither ‘yes’ to everything from the EU, nor ‘no’ to everything.
 
The EU is not a matter of everything or nothing. We have, in the past, done well in ensuring that Britain can participate in the collective good carried out by the EU, such as free markets, while keeping out of things that we believe would be bad for our country. For example, we are not part of the Schengen Zone but have kept control of our own border controls, just as, crucially, we have kept the pound.
 
And we should not lose sight of the EU’s very useful work, such as ensuring that all the nations of Europe are equipped to face the biggest challenges of the 21st Century: global competitiveness, global warming and global poverty. These are compelling arguments for why we believe Britain should be an active member.

That last paragraph is more or less nonsensical. What does the EU do to ‘equip’ all (sic) the nations of Europe to ‘face the challenge of global poverty’? The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy is a major poverty driver, in that it prevents Africa exploiting to the full its comparative advantage.

Of course the EU has some serious failings too, and there are certainly areas where its powers should be reduced. But a simplistic in/out referendum – posing an artificial choice that does not do justice to the range of views in the country – would be highly unlikely to settle the question of Britain’s membership of the EU at all.

Doesn’t that depend on what the referendum result actually is? If we voted to leave, we would then, presumably, leave. OK, in decades to come we might decide to apply to rejoin, so in that sense the issue would not be settled. But in that sense no issue is ever ‘settled’.

Another odd paragraph:

The Government has also introduced a European Union Bill, currently before Parliament, which will give Parliament and voters more say over important EU decisions. This new legislation will ensure that if, in the future, there is a change to EU Treaties that move a power or an area from the UK to the EU, the Government of the day will have to ask for the British people’s consent in a national referendum before it can be agreed. This ‘referendum lock’ ensures that politicians in Whitehall will never again be able to hand over more power to Brussels without asking the British people first.

Huh? How can a change to an EU Treaty move a ‘power or an area (sic) from the UK to the EU’? Is he referring to some possible scheme to transfer Greater Witney to Brussels?

Forget this eccentric letter. What is really happening here?

As Simon Nixon from the WSJ has just posted on Twitter,

UK now in curious position of actively begging EZ to embrace full political union. Cameron will be desperate not to put obstacles in way 

The startling fact now is that the Eurozone is in such turmoil that it probably does needs radical step towards a completely different sort of European Union, eg one featuring Joschka Fischer’s valiant Vanguard (states capable of sticking to the disciplines and hard-core sovereignty pooling of a single currency) and a forlorn Rearguard (ie everyone else). 

The problem with that arrangement is that it won’t be possible to ring-fence the Rearguard (including presumably the UK) from the political/economic and above all legal implications of running the Vanguard in a disciplined way. 

So highly pro-integration legal judgements and other edicts issuing from the Vanguard will end up being binding in form or substance or both on the Rearguard, whether they like it or not. Das Vanguard can not fail! That’s it!

Does the UK’s ‘referendum lock’ (European Union Act 2011) apply to ECJ rulings, which could be the main threat to effective national control of key decisions as the vanguard tries to survive? Not as far as I can see.

In practice the issue may not be: does the UK put to a referendum sovereignty-threatening parts of a new EU Treaty?

Instead we may face a quite different decision: does the UK decide to attend meetings which are all about scrapping the current bloc of EU Treaties and setting up a totally different structure, where the whole new scheme necessarily involves implicitly or explicitly radical and diminished implications for national sovereignty?

The issue, in other words, is not whether the UK leaves the EU.

It is whether the EU leaves the UK.