British minister hints he may campaign to leave EU

It is a very explicit and very important part of the prime minister’s renegotiation that Britain won’t be committed to “ever closer union”.

Cameron and Osborne, who in the interview referred to himself as a “eurosceptic”, are trying to deflect criticism that they are pushing to keep Britain in the bloc at too high a cost to national interest.

Mr Cameron last week said he will scrap the Cabinet convention of “collective responsibility” after negotiations end in the run up to the referendum, following concerns that Mr Grayling and others may resign.

Speaking after talks in Berlin with counterpart Wolfgang Schauble, he said Germany and France were among an emerging consensus that Britain was making a “perfectly reasonable case for change” that could benefit the whole bloc.

He said: “Britain and Greece have a number of issues of mutual interest including European Union reform, Cyprus and migration into Greece – on which the United Kingdom is supporting Greece in meeting the challenges it faces on irregular migration”.

While backing David Cameron’s bid to renegotiate the UK’s relationship with the EU, Grayling has now served notice that he is planning to campaign for Britain to leave the union during the upcoming referendum.

The four “baskets” of British demands are over economic governance, competitiveness, sovereignty, and immigration.

Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron said: “Chris Grayling’s comments reveal once again the split at the heart of the Conservative Party on the issue of Europe”.

He wrote: “I am someone who believes that simply staying in the European Union with our current terms of membership unchanged would be disastrous for Britain”.

Former American President Bill Clinton also called for a “No” vote while his wife Hillary, now a candidate for her party’s nomination for the presidency, said she would “hate” to see Britain “lose” Scotland. He and I fought an election campaign a year ago, a successful election campaign, in which we told the British people we were creating more jobs, we’d kept inflation down, we were bringing the deficit down, were creating millions of new apprenticeships.

He added: “All of these are very, very difficult issues that we have to work hard in these days to come to common, not only ideas, but agreements”.

“Clearly, if we can get the deal done in February, then that will be good progress. That’s always been the basis on which the Prime Minister began this process of regnegotiation”.

Osborne’s choice of the word “major” there is really interesting because he’s right.

A referendum could be held as early as this summer after the Prime Minister hinted he wanted a vote this year.

Mr Grayling’s Labour shadow Chris Bryant called his article a “farce”.