A fine fauxmance

The jury's out on how this word should be spelled. Fauxmance? Fomance? The latest in showbusiness is in "Dancing on Ice", where two contestants pretended to have fallen head over heels for each other in order to boost their viewer votes.

We are hearing tales of unlikely flirtation in the political arena too. We're asked to believe that ministers and advisers are just starting to find out how much autonomy the political class have signed away to the EU.

Thus James Forsyth writes that

Oliver Letwin, Cameron’s mild-mannered and cerebral Policy Minister, has become so frustrated by this constant interference that he has told colleagues he thinks Britain should leave the European Union if it won’t give us all the opt-outs the Government wants.

To be clear, this is not "constant interference" by some outside organisation. Ministers invited the elephant in and gave it a suitably large seat at the table. Letwin doubtless voted for it.

Which would be worse? If this is a cynical (and transparent) non-flirtation flirtation with euroscepticism got up to impress Tory backbenchers? Or if, through all his years in high politics, the "cerebral" Letwin never garnered any notion of how much power had been signed away to the EU?

Letwin is not alone in thinking this. In one department, a recent meeting between a Secretary of State and a junior Minister ended with the pair agreeing that the only solution to the problem they were discussing was to get out of the EU.

Ground-breaking! And have they said this in public? Will they? I think not. A Secretary of State should have known better (unless it was Vince Cable, who has to peer round his ego to see the world). Of course if it had been Ken Clarke he would have known, but shrugged with indifference.

Cameron’s strategy guru and close friend Steve Hilton is getting fed up with the way Brussels bureaucracy is blocking his agenda for a post-bureaucratic age.

Did Steve Hilton not know the EU was here?

But there is another layer to this government's fauxmance with euroscepticism. This will make you gasp. Shock and awe aren't in it.

Even the Lib Dems have been shocked at how much influence Brussels has on decisions that should be taken at a national level. Nick Clegg was appalled when officials told him that the EU wouldn’t allow VAT to be set at a local level.

See? The Lib Dems - ardent supporters of our EU membership - had no idea what they were talking about. Who would have thought it?

The usually levelheaded Iain Martin has heard this tosh too:

It seems that leading figures around the Prime Minister are rediscovering their Eurosceptic roots.

Oh please! But Martin hasn't quite swallowed the line. David Cameron, he writes, "is in love with being a European leader".

Merkel and Sarkozy did a very good number on him when he was in opposition, lavishing him with attention at various points and persuading Cameron that he would have tremendous influence once he was in power. Since the election they have treated young David as an equal, flattering him with regular calls and bolstering his standing at summits. Leaders absolutely love this stuff–the high-powered trips to Brussels where they can leave petty domestic concerns behind and play the statesman with other statesmen. The last thing Cameron is going to want to do having gained entry to the leaders’ club is to jeopardise his position.

So perhaps the tales of fauxmance are aimed at an audience across the Channel rather than at Westminster. That doesn't make them any more convincing.

If the fauxmantics are still in shock at the discovery that the EU is over here rather than over there, they should sit down before reading Mary Ellen Synon's excellent account of what the Irish have let themselves in for in their pact with the hierarchy of the EU.

Ministers can't say they weren't told. But they probably will. It's all deniable, you see.