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Professor Menon is concerned that political parties only use referenda as a political tactic not constitutional principle does this include the referenda for the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly London assembly etc, other than which all parties promised a referendum of the treaty which failed and Lisbon does everything that treaty did.

The other reason referenda are sniffed at is because they are notoriously bad at providing answers to the question actually asked. And people would vote either according to their view of the Union as a whole, or to make a point about something else entirely.

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Lord Tebbit trying to help Dave Cameron, suggests he might like to do some sums, in a letter to the Telegraph this morning he says;

The Conservative party of today is trying to find a place for itself within a basically socialist structure,

The figures are clear. At the last election that Labour lost, in 1992, Neil Kinnock’s vote was 11.6 million. In 1997, Tony Blair scored 13.5 million, an increase of 1.9 million. John Major’s vote fell from 14.1 million to 9.6 million - a loss of 4.5 million. The Liberal Democrat vote also fell by 0.8 million, most of which, one might guess, supported Mr Blair.

So, even if Tony Blair recruited not a single voter who had abstained in 1992 - a very unlikely scenario - no more than 1.1 million Tories deserted to New Labour. In all likelihood the total was less than half a million.

Obviously, they simply abstained and are still abstaining. As Mr Blair’s vote fell from 13.5 million in 1997 to 9.5 million in 2005 - a fall of four million - the Conservative vote, too, had fallen from 9.6 million to 8.8 million.

Just as Gordon Brown’s task is to persuade his lost four million voters to vote Labour, so Mr Cameron must know that his is to develop policies to persuade his missing five million Conservative voters that the Conservative Party is once again a hospitable home for Conservative electors.

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