To: The Rt Hon David Cameron MP

From: Party policy group on Europe

To date, our big European policies, like pulling our MEPs out of the European People’s Party, have been smart opposition politics. We need a policy for government.

Start with the European Parliament. It is a ghastly place, obsessed with its own power, but it has real clout. Forming our new group had a logic to it: the EPP is dominated by federalists and cheerleaders for the social market economy. In our new group, our allies from eastern

Europe are with us on the big stuff: they are Atlanticists, they oppose a federal superstate, and they more or less believe in free markets (just don’t ask our Polish friends about farm subsidies).

The British press are wrong to call them fascists. It is more of a timing problem: on issues like gay marriage, the environment or on views of the Germans, our new allies from Latvia and Poland are in line with mainstream British Conservative thinking…circa 1983. It is a structural British problem, too: only on our side of the English Channel can you be a tree-hugging centrist and Eurosceptic.

The challenge will be in maintaining relations with allies who will not leave the EPP, but think like us on climate change, EU spending or free trade – parties like the Swedish Moderates, or the Dutch Christian Democrats. The federalists long to split us from such allies and marginalise us as Europhobes. To make it harder to sideline us as Eurosceptic headbangers, we need to:

For a start, pick our battles. Here are three battles to avoid. First, ignore pleas to get Britain out of the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP). The CFP is a horror because lots of countries cheat. We cannot fix this alone. We are not Iceland, miles from anywhere and surrounded by cod. Our fish commute between British and foreign waters. The Dutch have historic rights to English waters, the French have historic rights to Scottish waters, and the Spanish are everywhere. If we ran our own fisheries, we would need an army of bureaucrats to negotiate all this. And you could fit Britain’s fishermen in a single football stadium (and most are Scottish, so do not vote for us).

Second: EU asylum policy. Our voters would love us to opt out of this. But some big things about the status quo suit us. For instance, the Dublin II directive says that asylum seekers must file a claim in the first EU country they reach. If asylum seekers reach Britain from the continent, we get to send them back to their first entry country. As a rock off the top left-hand corner of Europe, we are big winners from this rule, which turns places like Italy, Greece, Malta or Poland into flypaper for migrants.

Third, there is this idea about restoring Britain’s opt-out from the soci......