Never Send A Salesman to Do A Statesman's Job

Since it is nominally the prime minister's job to govern in the interests of the whole country, Daveybloke has been all of a tizzy trying to govern in the interests of his own shrinking faction of the Conservative Party. Daveybloke is on a trip to the USA at the moment, whereby he presumably hoped to add a certain statesmanlike glow to his natural maroon-rubber sheen; unfortunately, Daveybloke's heroic abstention from wog jokes in the presence of Barack Obama has been overshadowed by the antics of a few dozen back-bench baboons and a couple of treacherous toadies in the Cabinet. Accordingly, in a fit of near-absolute non-panic Daveybloke has ordered the solicitor general locked in a room with a biro and the back of an envelope, and the solicitor general has scribbled out a 500-word bill to keep the apes on-side, providing for a referendum on British independence from Brussels by December 2017. The government, should there be one by that time, will be under no obligation to leave the EU if a majority vote in favour of doing so; which is certainly in line with the Conservative Party's idea of democracy. The measure has worked about as well as Daveybloke's UKIP-lite measures usually work: the amendment which it was intended to undercut will go ahead anyway, the baboons will do as they please, and it will all be the fault of the Liberal Democrats.