To give Cameron his due, the Bloomberg speech did applaud parliamentary sovereignty. He said that in his view, "There is not a single European demos. It is national parliaments, which are, and will remain, the true source of real democratic legitimacy and accountability in the EU." Fine, but Cameron must not delude himself: his assertion of national parliamentary sovereignty is the antithesis of the notion of a United States of Europe. The same warning applies to Boris Johnson who on August 8 gave an interview to the Evening Standard to spell out his brand of Euro-scepticism. He claimed that it would be "easy" for Cameron to negotiate the return of powers from Brussels to Westminster. In his words: "There is no reason why an IGC (Intergovernmental Conference) to settle all the points shouldn't be done" by 2017. That sounded robust, but was in fact naïve. The lesson of history is clear: the EU bureaucrats think harder and more deeply, and over a longer time horizon, than national politicians. The supranational Monnet vision has come to overshadow, even to suppress, Gaullist intergovernmentalism. Johnson is kidding himself if he thinks it will "easy" for a Conservative government to outsmart the Commission and the Council of Ministers. 

Who can overlook that the Lisbon Treaty has a long list of competences to be transferred to EU institutions this November? Indeed, cannot Cameron see the incompatibility of the Lisbon Treaty with core features of the British constitution? That explains why so many thoughtful and serious conservative-minded British people were appalled when, in November 2009, Cameron cancelled his cast-iron guarantee to hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. Can't he understand the anger and resentment?

Until the 1986 Single European Act the UK retained the veto in all its areas of engagement with the EEC, apart from external trade, agriculture and fisheries. In November, when the 2009 Lisbon Treaty's transfer of competences comes fully into effect, the veto will have gone in more than 40 such areas of engagement. The bureaucrats have won. Once a competence has been handed over to the Commission, the Cameron formula of "nation states wherever possible, Europe only where necessary" is overridden and useless. 

Voters want to believe that our Prime Minister has a settled, intellectually consistent position on the optimal relationship between the UK and the EU. All the evidence is that he has no such position. Instead, he makes things up as he goes along. Is he opposed to the UK belonging to a United States of Europe? Yes or no, please.

The Monnet vision of Europe is now the one on offer; the Gaullist conception is dying, perhaps already dead, an outcome for which Monnet and Hallstein schemed more than 60 years ago. David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Philip Hammond, and the Conservative Party more generally, are right to be rethinking the UK's position in the EU. But they are fantasising if they believe that the restoration of intergovernmentalism and the supremacy of national parliaments will be "easy" while Britain remains an EU member state.