Kaminksi has announced he is standing down as Chairman of the Conservatives for European Reform group in the European parliament because of extremism in its ranks. Nick Clegg famously denounced the Conservative allies in Europe as ‘nutters, anti-semites and homophobes’. Kaminski was not personally antisemitic but he did attacks efforts by Polish politicians to apologise for the wartime massacre of Jews by Poles in Jedwabne. He also supported General Pinochet and in his youth had belonged to a far-right political party linked to pre-war Polish anti-Jewish politics. He was openly homophobic and handed out leaflets at Warsaw station to foreigners urging them to stay out of Poland.

This kind of populist politics of bigotry, including antisemitism, remains a plague in Polish and east European and Baltic rightwing politics as many local academic and impartial studies have shown. Cameron had simply not studied the background of his new allies. Writers on the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail tried to brush aside the brutish background of Cameron’s new friends. Michal Kaminski was brought to the October 2009 Conservative party conference as a hero of a new anti-EU grouping that would transform European rightwing politics. The loyal true blue Tory MEP, Edward Macmillan Scott, was expelled from the Conservative group of MEPs on Cameron’s orders because he dared to criticise his leader’s choice. Daniel Hannam MEP exulted in the choice of Kaminski. Stephen Pollard, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, who should have known better, attacked with his robust polemical style anyone who criticised Kaminski because of his approach to the treatment of Jews in wartime Poland.

East European politics is fissiparous, centrifugal and highly personalised at the best of times. David Cameron had won the support of a key group of anti-EU Conservative MPs grouped around Liam Fox and Bill Cash in 2005 when he needed their votes to defeat David Davis to become Tory leader. Forty MPs who had voted for Liam Fox said they would transfer their support to whoever promised to lead the Tories out of the centre-right European People’s Party where conservatives like Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy or Poland’s Donald Tusk and Sweden’s Fredick Reinfeldt have their European political home.

David Davis is as Eurosceptic as anyone. But as a former Europe minister he knew it was insane for the Tories to effect a rupture with mainstream EU centre-right politics to get into bed with Clegg’s ‘nutters, anti-Semites and homophobes.’ He refused the Fox-Cash offer. Cameron had no scruples and signed up to the leadership election-winning deal no matter the consequences.

Now the Cam-Kam duet has collapsed as Kaminski has quit Cameron’s European political grouping. The effects will not be much felt in Brussels, let alone Strasbourg. The Conservatives campaigned as Eurosceptics in opposition but have to govern as Eurorealists in power. But the UK’s economic weakness, its high inflation and slumping pound and lack of growth means that no-one is really listening to Cameron. The symbolism of slashing at the BBC’s overseas services, the shrinking of Britain’s voice to a whine, goes along with the growing indifference elsewhere in Europe to what less and less impressive Britain is doing.

William Hague is listless and uninspiring as foreign secretary and Cameron has reduced foreign policy to trade policy refusing even to support in public Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel peace Laureate held in prison by his communist jailers.

The end of Kaminski as leader of the Tory MEPs is a farce easily foretold. But it leaves the Conservatives and Britain more and more isolated in the decision-making circles of Europe. 

Photo: European Parliament