Good God! When it comes to the EU and unilateralism, Conservative and Labour MPs are even more cowardly than I'd suspected!

First, there are all those ladyboy Blairite/centrist Labour MPs fannying about threatening to do something really drastic if their Trotskyite leaders go full loonytunes and back a policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament - a policy that (among many other shortcomings) made their party unelectable between 1979 and 1997. What comes out of the mouths of pro-nuclear defence MPs is:

I will do such things,--
What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be
The terrors of the earth. 

...but what "such things" boil down to is an off-the-record whining session with a political journalist, and getting a bit shouty in meetings when the Dear Leader sends some hapless member of the Politburo to soak up a bit of verbal punishment over his latest piece of doolalliness.

The one thing that partly excuses these cowardly lions is that Labour isn't in power, Jezbollah was elected by a sizeable majority of party members, and none of them really expects the old twit to be leader come the next general election. If they do eventually manage to defenestrate Steptoe, they'll probably argue (albeit feebly) that they refrained from going medieval on the old twit's ass in public - or resigning from a shadow cabinet post - in the interests of party "unity". "We saw it as our duty," they'll pompously inform us, "to steady the ship." Yeah, yeah - good for you.

But I feel even greater contempt for those Tory ministers who have spent years fooling the party faithful by masquerading as eurosceptics. Their leader, David Cameron, went to the EU, cap in hand, and begged for enough "concessions" to allow him to claim that he'd persuaded the EU to reform itself, and that, therefore, Britain could remain a member without being constantly assailed by a sense of national shame that a once proud country was allowing itself to be pushed around by a bunch of left-wing bureaucratic bullies intent on destroying national boundaries and national cultures. Since Cameron slunk back with his risible "peace in our time" Potemkin deal, Theresa May, Michael Gove and Philip Hammond have all indicated that they'll be supporting Cameron's campaign to remain on board the Titanic. The former eurosceptic minister Nick Herbert has gone one step further by announcing that he'll be leading Conservatives for Reform in Europe, a new pro-EU Tory group. Meanwhile, Boris Johnson - who writes amusingly rude things about the EU, but is no one's idea of a sceptic - is desperately trying to figure out whether taking up the cudgels on behalf of the Leave campaign would help him usurp George Osborne as Cameron's successor, or spell the end of his leadership ambitions.

Shame on all of them.

I'm pretty sure that the Euro referendum result will mirror the Scottish Independence result. With formerly eurosceptic Tory MPs deserting the cause, small "c" conservative voters who might otherwise have been tempted to stick two fingers up to a patently doomed enterprise will opt for a quiet life and vote to remain. This will result in a 10% or greater majority for staying. Within weeks of the result, there'll be a series of anti-national sovereignty outrages engineered by EU-crats determined to revenge themselves on the UK, and - as in Scotland - a vast groundswell of support for the Leave camp and demands for another referendum. But, as in Scotland, those demands will come too late - this country will be forever shackled to a disastrously failing left-wing superstate run by unelected socialist ideologues. Or...

....the disparate parts of the Leave campaign could coalesce into one well-funded, well-coordinated, professional campaign able to reach all parts of the electorate with a loudly-delivered, relentlessly upbeat message. The problem for the Scots Nats was that the the other side was able to rip their ludicrously optimistic economic projections to pieces - and, given the current price of oil, they were right, and the EU made it clear that an independent Scotland wouldn't automatically be allowed to join their continental death cult.  But the fear-mongering of the EU Remain lot consists of nothing but hysterical and demonstrably unjustifiable lies - the economic "leap into the void" scenario, the idea that no EU country would choose to do business with UK firms, the farcical notion that the economic migrants in Calais would immediately set up their jungle camp somewhere in Kent (we're an island an we have an army and guns and stuff), the idea that we'd lose our influence with the US (we don't have any), and that the City of London will become a ghost town etc. We Leavers have a terrific story to tell compared to the other side's peely-wally pessimist piffle (the other side mainly consisting of the BBC, the government, the Scots, and left-liberal public sector troughers). I just fear that internal squabbling and UKIP's sense that it's entitled to lead the fight might drown out that feelgood message. I really hope I'm wrong, because this is the most momentous decision the British people have been called upon to make since the war. It's really frightfully important that the people on the right side of the argument give it their best shot.

As for Gove, May, Hammond and their fellow Tory turncoats - unless they know something that they're unable to share with the rest of us, how will they will be able to live with their treachery?