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THE ANTIPATHY to all things European manifested at the Conservative Party conference in Manchester this week is not just the usual case of an extremist rank and file tail wagging a cautious parliamentary dog. The delegates, sad to say, are probably genuinely in tune with Britain’s Eurosceptical public mood and with most of their MPs on the issue.

But there is also clearly a leadership reluctance to embrace a wholehearted assault on the European Union, a desire to pull punches, most notably to fudge commitments to referendums, despite the instincts of many senior members. That has a lot to do with a more nuanced understanding of that public mood – although hostile to the EU, voters tell pollsters the issue is not by any means at the top of their to-do list. For the Tories to make the issue a central plank of their election campaign might well be to send out the message that they do not share the electorate’s sense of priorities, whatever about their values. And that therefore, as Labour will try to show, they are essentially the unreformed ideological party of old, not the pragmatic, modern, centrist New Tories that leader David Cameron is so keen to project.