The government are insisting that yesterday's European Union referendum vote was "not a humiliation."
Well, what was it then? It certainly wasn't good news for the government - it was the biggest back-bench rebellion since World War Two. Consider that all three major parties were whipping their members for a "No" vote - and there were still 111 Ayes, not to mention a few abstentions. If Labour and the Lib Dems had actually wanted to defeat the government on this one, they could have done. It just so happens the Tories were standing up for the more liberal position on this one - more on that later.
The government really made a fool of itself by imposing a three-line whip - meaning that anyone with a cabinet or government job who broke the party line would have to resign and go back to the back benches. They tried to play hard-ball, but still leaked 81 votes, and that makes them look rather silly. This was always going to get voted down by the commons, given Labour and the Lib Dems whipping in the same direction, but David Cameron decided he needed to look in charge of his party. Now it just looks like he can't control them, even with the most dire threats at his disposal. That's hardly going to inspire confidence, and it points to a deeper seated problem Cameron has been having with his party for some time now.
There are a lot of Tories who were unhappy with Cameron's leadership in the first place, after he failed to win the General Election and had to give up ground to the Lib Dems, the unlikliest of allies. His attempts to control the 1922 Committee, the influential grouping of back-bench Tories, didn't go down at all well either. Europe is the great division between the Prime Minister and his party - many Tories simply don't agree with their leader's position, which is really one of pragmatism on his part.
Cameron has to continue to court the middle-class vote, sticking with the Tony Blair model, and with Labour continuing to refuse to commit to a policy foundation he should be relatively free to do so. This isn't a problem brought on for him by the opposition - this is entirely of his own creation. This is "compassionate conservativism" and his attempt to drag the party closer to the political centre coming home to roost - like a less successful Blair, Cameron has achieved electoral results by betraying some of the principles of his party. We all know how that ended, and Cameron doesn't even have a landslide victory to back up his position.
When he took the reins, David Cameron recognised that the Conservatives couldn't win by being Conservatives - they needed to push for the centre ground, the territory New Labour exploited so effectively in 1997 and 2001. By moving into the middle, Labour alienated the left, and similarly Cameron's move has alienated the right. The Liberal Democrats are the fly in the ointment now - were the Tories in power alone, they could stray back to the right and appease the back benches, but they're held in the centre instead appeasing their coalition partners. This just underlines once again that David Cameron failed to win the General Election on his own, and that wider context is why the EU referendum vote was a humiliation for the government - because it was the first rebellion of many.
