So why didn't he utter the r-word? Tony Blair's coyness in not actually using the word 'referendum' in his statement yesterday on the EU constitution was duly mocked by Michael Howard. But the omission was surely down to more than mere political embarrassment. The British people, said the Prime Minister, would have their say on the issue. Well what does that mean? It could mean in a general election. Such vagueness is surely no accident. So what's he up to?

Alice Miles in the Times has a stab at unpicking this:

'There is every possibility that there will never be a referendum. Which doesn’t mean that Mr Blair doesn’t want to have the battle anyway...'

A referendum, Miles argues, is simply too dangerous given the state of public opinion. Gordon Brown isn't yet convinced in any event that the constitution is worth fighting for, and other MPs suggest that maybe Blair should refuse to sign it at all. So what impelled Blair to commit himself to a course which his own side think is suicidal? Sheer opportunism in a political tight corner -- so opportunistic, in fact, he never actually committed himself to it. As Miles says:

'This is not something that is going to be resolved neatly by June. And if it is not signed in June, then who knows when it might be agreed — and in what format. If there is a referendum, a Treasury source suggested, it will end up being on whether the British people are content to remain part of the EU. “This constitution word is slightly unhelpful, to be honest.”'

This is the fight Blair is itching to have. European integration is the issue that drives him, the issue that makes sense of his total project, the issue that lies at the heart of his utopianism. He clearly believes that the arguments of the other side are all specious rubbish which he can defeat in argument. This is his biggest mistake yet. For it is on Europe that we see exposed with the most transparent cruelty the limits both of his intellectual grasp and the desperate need to fill the ideological vacuum caused by the implosion of socialism; and the extent to which this weakness has caused him to fall for the mendacious, mind-twisting propaganda of European zealotry.

Only this -- surely -- explains the toe-curling inanity of the lies he told in the Commons yesterday about the constitution, each of which no doubt he believes with perfect faith. In any debate on the EU he will be taken to the cleaners. For his side simply has no arguments which stand up to serious scrutiny. The constitution is the nation-wrecking measure it is said to be. Joining the euro is a political rather than an economic project. The reason why the europhiles have lost the argument so far is not because of some sinister hold sections of the media have on the public mind. It is because the argument has been had and they have comprehesively lost it -- because every one of their arguments is either bogus, mendacious or plain demonstrably wrong.

Let the battle commence, indeed.