David Cameron is facing fresh pressure to grant ministers a free vote during the EU referendum campaign after Michael Howard, the former Conservative leader, joined those calling for collective responsibility to be suspended.
Lord Howard said on Sunday that although Cameron was right to insist on ministers backing his strategy now, he should let them campaign for an out vote without having to resign once the campaign properly gets under way.
“For now cabinet ministers are too busy running their departments and they shouldn’t have time to campaign one way or another on the referendum,” said Howard in an interview recorded for the World at One on BBC Radio 4. “But when it comes to the campaign, if there are cabinet ministers who feel strongly that we should vote to leave the European Union, they should certainly be allowed to do so without losing their seat.”
Tories who want Britain to leave the EU are becoming increasingly vocal in their calls for a free vote and even some of their colleagues opposed to a Brexit think it will be hard for Cameron to insist on collective responsibility during the campaign.
The government is still renegotiating its terms of membership of the EU, and a final deal is not expected until February. At that point Cameron is expected to welcome the reforms and formally commit the government to campaigning for an in vote.
Downing Street sources say Cameron will not decide until that point whether to maintain normal collective cabinet responsibility, or whether to allow ministers to campaign for an out vote while keeping their government jobs, although some Tories believe that in practice the issue is settled and there will be a free vote.
David Maclean, a former Conservative chief whip who now sits in the House of Lords as Lord Blencathra, told the Sunday Times that ministers should be free to campaign for Britain to leave the EU. Without a free vote, he said, “you could have the same bitterness that applied after Maastricht”.
In a separate article in the Mail on Sunday, David Davis, a Eurosceptic and Cameron’s principal rival in the 2005 leadership contest, said he he would campaign for an out vote. “The truth is we are now being asked to give up control of our own future to exercise an influence we no longer have in the interest of an institution that may be beyond reform,” he wrote.
“As a former Europe minister, it pains me to say that I have reached a tipping point and concluded that it is in both our best interests and the EU’s best interests that we seek our future in the wider world.”
In an interview with the Sunday Times, Graham Brady, chair of the Conservative backbench 1922 committee, said he had been prepared to see what Cameron’s renegotiation produced but he was now leaning towards voting for Britain to leave the EU.
