Nick Pickles’s blog

Europe may be back, but why is it even on the radar? Because there’s a vacuum at the heart of Government, and at the heart of the Conservative Party.

A rebellion is far more likely when there’s nothing for your supporters to rally behind. So it is even more worrying that the leadership of the Conservative party has had no detail, no vision, to offer backbench MPs and party activists on an issue that was always going to come up.

The crisis in the Eurozone has been on the agenda for so long now it is amazing how surprised Downing Street seems to have been taken by the whole thing. I have yet to hear a single clear policy objective from the Government, the main narrative has been about membership of the EU and the danger of withdrawal.

If you offer a vision, a way forward, then you can make the case for rejecting a course of action that would undermine your objective. That is why detail matters on what a Conservative government would do, if the Lib Dems are the issue, or alternatively what the Coalition will do at a treaty change.

Simply, because nobody knows what the Coalition wants to see from Europe - or indeed what a Conservative government would want to do - the only course of action available is what has been put infront of the house today. The underlying reason will not be dealt with by political discipline, and indeed does nothing to address the clear public concern on the issue.

David Cameron should have come to the house today with a clear plan of what he would do in the coming months, and offered leadership.

In arguing against change - rather than in favour of his own vision - he only added fuel to the fire and drove his MPs to rebellion.