Obama intervention and getting debate back on economy helps EU In campaign scent victory

THEY are not popping open the champagne yet.

But Downing Street is increasingly confident of victory in the EU referendum. Some there are even predicting that In will get more than 60 per cent of the vote on June 23.

What has made them so bullish isn’t just Barack Obama’s intervention but that they have got the debate back on to the economy.

However spurious George Osborne’s claim that Brexit will leave households £4,300 worse off, it has dominated the debate this week.

“It has cut through,” concedes one senior member of Vote Leave. They are braced for the polls moving against them in the coming days.

One lesson the Out campaign has taken from the past week is it has to avoid fighting on the Government’s turf.

One Cabinet Brexiteer likens the past week to an “away fixture, where the best you can hope to do is to nick an away goal or two”.

The truth, though, is that — unless something changes — the Government is on course to win and keep Britain inside the EU. It believes the Out campaign’s biggest weakness is that it can’t spell out precisely what Britain’s relationship with the EU would be post-Brexit.

“They’re like someone trying to sell you a car, saying, ‘Your car is clapped out. Sell it and buy a new one’. But they won’t show you the new car,” says one senior No10 figure.

The Government and the In campaign are salivating at the prospect of spending next week “punching the bruise” on the idea that Britain could have an Albanian-style relationship with the EU.

But for all No10’s confidence, it is still trying to knobble the TV debates. It thinks it can do this because, in the words of one Government source: “If you don’t have Cameron or Osborne, the interest goes massively down.”

Those close to the negotiations suspect that what No10 wants is to engineer a situation where these town hall-style events are Cameron/Farage. A match-up that they know will favour them. But this would be absurd: Farage isn’t even part of the official Out campaign.

In a democracy, the Government should not get to pick who its opponents are.

However much Cameron wants to avoid “blue on blue” action, it would be a national scandal if his side of the referendum debate got to influence who represents the Out side in these TV events.

Downing Street is also saying that it is “deeply sceptical” of the BBC’s plan for a debate at Wembley Arena two days before polling day.

By contrast, the Leave campaign is up for it. Boris Johnson is prepared to take part regardless of who the other side puts up.

This week, George Osborne — in an insult that will dog any bid he makes for the Tory leadership — called those saying that Brexit would benefit Britain “economically illiterate”.

If the Government is so confident of its argument, surely he and Cameron should be prepared to debate whoever the Out campaign puts up? The fact they won’t tells an awful lot.

Striking junior docs so selfish

IT is the most selfish and irresponsible strike in British history.

On Tuesday and Wednesday next week, junior doctors will take industrial action, refusing to do even emergency care between 8am and 5pm.

This walkout isn’t over some issue of high principle, but money. Their beef is that Saturday shouldn’t be treated as a normal working day.

But under the Government’s offer, those junior doctors on duty one Saturday in four will receive a premium pay rate of 30 per cent. This means they are, on average, getting paid more for working on Saturdays than nurses, midwives and paramedics.

The proposed deal is also more generous than what firefighters and police officers get for doing their job on a Saturday.

This is hardly grounds for a walkout that will almost inevitably put lives at risk.

Junior doctors are right, they are paid less than doctors in some other countries. But this is largely because the state has heavily subsidised their education.

By the time a doctor has finished their foundation training, the state has already spent a quarter of a million pounds on them.

Until doctors are prepared to pick up more of this tab themselves, they shouldn’t complain that some foreign counterparts are paid more than them.

Indeed, before funding their training, the state should actually require medical students to commit to working in the NHS for a certain number of years.

Junior doctors should also remember that if they stay in the profession and become consultants, they will be in the top two per cent of earners in this country.

On Tuesday, junior doctors should remember what they came into the profession for – to try to heal the sick – and cross the picket line.

— DAVID CAMERON could be found at a five-star hotel in London’s Knightsbridge on Wednesday night. He was there to raise money for the In campaign.

But, intriguingly, he was doing this with a host of Labour figures as well as Tory ones. Cameron was speaking at the event alongside Labour’s Chuka Umunna and Tory grandee Lord Heseltine.

Umunna wasn’t the only Labour figure joining Cameron for a three-course meal at the Berkeley hotel, Alan Johnson – the leader of the Labour In campaign – and Tristram Hunt were also there.

I’m told that a tieless Cameron was clearly slightly uncomfortable during the question and answer session with donors.

But the most striking fact to have come out of this blast of fundraising activity is that the In campaign thinks that more people will vote in the referendum than did at the General Election, with turnout at 68 per cent as opposed to 66 per cent last May.

— STEVE HILTON was David Cameron’s senior advisor when he first became Prime Minister. He saw how power works in this country.

So when he warns of the effect that the need to raise coin has on our politics, we should listen.

He tells me: “I remember Tory politicians complaining all the time about the endless dinners they had to sit through with bankers and hedge fund guys whining about how much tax they had to pay and so on . . . They’d leave thinking, ‘these people are on another planet but we have to suck up to them because we need their money’.”

Labour, with its reliance on trade union money, isn’t any better.

But Hilton has a plan to make it easier for ordinary voters to give money through the website, crowdpac.co.uk.

He hopes that by the next election, half of the money raised will come from these small, online donations.

— NATO cannot allow Islamic State to control territory bordering the Mediterranean. If it does, there is a real danger that migrant boats could start heading to Europe from an IS-controlled zone.

“There’s very real concern about them holding that coastline,” one senior Government source tells me.

The problem is the new Libyan government hasn’t yet asked for Western assistance to deal with this problem.

But the West, for its own security, cannot allow a terrorist enclave on the shores of the Med.