In Polite Company

From Tom Harris to George Galloway, these are the people who ought to be leading the campaign against the EU.

Instead, we get old women of both sexes, in funny hats accordingly.

Galloway is saying what the people who are now running the Labour Party obviously think.

In the privacy of a polling both, they, too, will vote against David Cameron and the memory of Margaret Thatcher, and in favour of the memory of Tony Benn. Of course they will.

Galloway has form. He toured Scotland making the traditional left-wing case for the Union, and who knows what effect his remarkable oratorical skills might have had? Perhaps he intends to repeat the trick?

And Harris? Labour Leave is run by John Mills and Brendan Chilton, who both supported Liz Kendall for Leader. Tony Blair thought little of the EU in practice, and Gordon Brown thought even less.

There was no doubt about the fundamental scepticism of John Prescott, Robin Cook, Jack Straw, Margaret Beckett, David Blunkett, Ed Balls, Yvette Cooper, the anti-Maastricht Peter Hain, and plenty of others besides.

New Labour kept Britain out of the euro and out of the Schengen Agreement. The war in Iraq had a pronounced Eurosceptical dimension to it, positively revelling in standing with America against France and Germany.

Like Neil Kinnock's, Peter Mandelson's mind was only really changed by the employment opportunities. Alastair Campbell's and Charlie Wheelan's probably never have been. John Rentoul remains bracingly critical of the EU.

And so on.

None of this necessarily adds up to a desire to pull out of the whole thing. And there were plenty of people in and around New Labour who were very enthusiastic indeed about the EU.

But there were plenty of people who were not. And that had enormous ramifications in policy terms.