David Cameron is no Europhile – and that's why his opponents tell a more convincing story

There is nothing like poverty to make you feel like you’ve lost that rare commodity – control. Michael Gove and the Leave campaign present themselves to these voters as the messengers of salvation

Polling suggests the Leave campaign is now edging ahead in the run up to the EU referendum on June 23 (Reuters)

It wasn’t meant to be this way. With barely two weeks to go until the EU referendum, the Leave campaign has a lead in the polls and, crucially, it has the momentum. No wonder David Cameron looked tired and slightly frayed in TV appearances last week, failing to win over the studio audience on Sky on Thursday, and snapping at ITV’s Kate Garraway on Friday morning in a manner distinctly un-prime ministerial.

He never really wanted this referendum, probably never really thought he’d have to deliver it, and certainly never imagined that the biggest fight of his political life would be to keep the UK in the European Union, an institution with which he has many frustrations and for which his enthusiasm extends only so far as pragmatic national self-interest.

The Remain campaign had by far the better of the early exchanges, when warnings of the economic consequences of Brexit had an effective shock and awe quality to them.

But in a campaign characterised by sensational claims, sober warnings from reliable sources such as the Bank of England and the Institute for Fiscal Studies have lost their ability to cut through to voters.

It was extremely telling that, during Cameron’s Sky News appearance, it was in those moments when he or the interviewer claimed to be debunking a myth that the audience responded most enthusiastically. It was a clear sign that people feel like they are being lied to. Both sides bear responsibility for this. Downing Street never should have let a very good David Cameron speech be spun as a warning about “World War Three”.

Meanwhile the Leave campaign has demonstrated a relationship with the truth reminiscent of George Orwell’s O’Brien in 1984. It’s hard to listen to Boris Johnson explaining why the infamous £350m figure is a perfectly reasonable one to use without imagining him looming over Winston Smith in Room 101 and saying: “Sometimes two plus two are five”.

In this feverish post-truth atmosphere, facts and reason go out the window as effective political arguments. Many voters simply don’t trust anything anyone says on the EU anymore. The eventual winner in this referendum therefore won’t be the side with the best facts, it will be the one with the best story to tell.

Which brings us back to Cameron. As the holder of the still-respected office of Prime Minister, he is an enormous asset to Remain. But in any other circumstances somebody with such an ambiguous relationship with the European Union would be unthinkable as the leader of the Remain argument.

At a time of great uncertainty and insecurity, at home and abroad, an electorate want to hear a story about how voting to Remain could make their lives better – not just how it could ensure their lives don’t get worse. But, in part because he has no love for Europe, David Cameron has no story to tell.

Contrast Michael Gove, who on Friday night on Sky News was very clear what story he had come to preach. In a TV appearance lasting less than one hour, he used the word “control” 35 times. Factor in the advert breaks and the interruptions and that’s close to one “control” a minute.

“We can take back control of our destiny”, “control migration”, “take back control of our democracy”.

This is not the sign of a man in desperate need of a thesaurus. It is a man at the forefront of a campaign that has made an astute diagnosis of the underlying malaise felt by the white, working and middle class majorities of Western countries – Britain included.

People feel that, somewhere along the way, they lost control of their lives; or rather, lost the power to change the course of their lives. It would be a brave commentator who pretended to understand all the causes for this. But it’s no surprise that support for Leave is strongest among the less well-off, the less highly-educated – people who were not the beneficiaries of a long period of economic growth when the EU and the free market flourished in 1990s and 2000s, and who became victims when governments responded to the economic crash with austerity.

There is nothing like poverty to make you feel like you’ve lost that rare commodity: control.

Michael Gove and the Leave campaign present themselves to these voters as the messengers of salvation. They offer an easy explanation for that loss of control: Europe. Europe took it from you. Subliminally, they go further, meddling with dangerous forces by implying that it was also the immigrants which the EU allowed in. It is a dangerous lie to tell. But it is a story with a beginning, a middle and an imagined end: Britain “truly great again”, out of Europe, back in control – of our money, our borders, and each of our individual destinies.

What will the Remain campaign have to do to counter such a compelling story, even if it is make believe, now that their facts and reasoned arguments seem to count for very little? They need to tell one of their own. It must appeal to the same currents of national strength that Vote Leave tap into, and it needs to have a happy ending.

The EU, so often imagined by Britons as some distant stronghold of continental technocracy, is in fact an extremely British institution. Winston Churchill helped shape its charter of human rights.

It was Britain that ensured the EU remained a mostly economic, not an undemocratically political, union. It was Britain that fought for its values and support to be extended to Eastern European countries ravaged by decades of Soviet rule. These are arguments put forward not by our current Prime Minister, but by our previous one.

“We shouldn’t just be a member of the EU we should be a leader of the EU,” Gordon Brown said in a grassroots campaign video last week. “Soon we will be the strongest economy in Europe. The smaller nations look to us for leadership and what message would we send to the rest of the world if we the British people were to walk away from our nearest neighbours.”

David Cameron will struggle to put an unashamedly Europhile vision at the centre of his campaign. He has his party to think about. But he urgently needs a better story to tell voters – otherwise this referendum could well be the end of his.