Ben Emmott in the Times says that if Ireland (as expected) says Yes to the Lisbon Treaty, the UK Conservatives need to shut up and move on.

Not that he is too impressed with the way the issue has been dealt with:

The whole charade should anger anyone who cares about democracy, and indeed about Europe. A constitutional exercise that when it began in 2001 was supposed to make the EU more democratic, transparent and comprehensible to its citizens is doing just the opposite.

But he has had enough:

Part of the reason, I confess, is boredom … economic crises, Iranian nuclear weapons programmes and rising Chinese power offer far more real and important topics for Europeans to think about. If getting this treaty passed has been a war of attrition, then I am ready to wave the white flag.

… I still don’t like the treaty, as it represents a huge missed opportunity to modernise the EU, and, more technically, offers too many opportunities to the European Court of Justice to add to federal powers in future. But since 25 governments have accepted it, and since their peoples have not shown that they care much about the treaty nor about the denial of their right to vote on it, it is time to give up.

And he advises the Conservatives to do just that:

Look at the way European policies are being shaped: not by the European Commission or by any band of federalist ultras, but strictly by deals between governments. But look, most of all, at Germany’s election last Sunday…

For a new Tory government in Britain, the European scene could not be better, with right-wing parties in power in both France and Germany.

He concludes:

No British government, let alone a Tory one, is going to fall head over heels in love with a French or German counterpart of any political stripe. But to provoke a row over a boring institutional treaty, which virtually everyone else has already agreed to, would be folly, grand scale.

Indeed, if Messrs Cameron and Hague do hang on to Lisbon as one of their battles, it would raise serious doubts about their fitness for government.

Meanwhile over in the Indy we have a different take from Sholto Burns, contributing New Statesman editor (so no Righty) who points up the

… old calumny that to be Eurosceptic is to be right-wing, not just in a free-market sort of way, but in a hang ’em, flog ’em, and – whisper it behind closed doors – a "wogs begin at Calais" sort of way…

This is a cynical and false elision, and it should not stand. It has stifled real debate on this issue for too long, and is a stain on the undoubted idealism of the many Europhiles who fail to acknowledge it.

For all it takes to have a profound suspicion of the EU and its greedy accretion of powers is this: to believe in transparency and accountability; to feel in your bones that sovereignty should not be passed from nation state to international body without the voters being consulted; and to desire that those voters should be as close as possible to the representatives they elect. To be, in other words, a democrat…

... one could simply remember the words of our last Prime Minister. Arch-Europhile that he was, even Tony Blair declared in 2004 that when it came to the EU Constitution, and to the EU in general, it was time to "let the people have the final say".

Perhaps his Labour successors can put me right, but I find nothing particularly right-wing about that.

So there it is, folks.

Unless the next UK government sighs and goes along with a series of cynical power-plays designed by its predecessor and others in the European elite to thwart popular views on the future of Europe, they will be unfit to govern.

Or is it not that?

Maybe the government which is unfit to govern is the one which tosses overboard centuries-old national powers and prerogatives and practices basically because it is just all difficult – and because key commentators and senior civil servants are bored with the whole matter?