David Cameron is a Euro-savvy leader, but that won't mean much when it comes to the Brexit vote

The referendum is about the small-minded grievance that Britons were never asked what they thought about Europe

David Cameron has travelled to virtually every state in the European Union during his premiership. (Reuters)

However today’s European Union summit plays out, it would be a harsh critic who begrudged David Cameron an agreement capable of carrying a referendum in June. The merest glance at his diary over the past couple of months would induce weariness in even the most enthusiastic of travellers.

He has visited corners of old and new Europe that, in some cases, he last visited as a student. He has given press conferences and speeches from Sofia to Hamburg, via Copenhagen. He has sometimes seemed to be commuting to Warsaw non-stop, only to receive an earful when he got there. But greeting Poland’s Prime Minister earlier this month, he said he was “delighted to be back here in Warsaw”, and almost sounded as though he meant it.

At last week’s Syria donors’ conference he found time for bilateral meetings with – wait for it – his Bulgarian, Austrian, Slovak, Swedish, German, Belgian, Estonian, Polish and Greek counterparts. And he has done it all with a remarkably good grace, and flicks of cultural sensitivity – a little digression on the Hanseatic League at the start of his Hamburg speech on Monday, a sentence or two in French at the start of his cross-channel visit after the Paris bombings – that were not hitherto much in evidence.

Personal pride, too, has counted for little, as he set about mending the same fences that he was at least partly responsible for destroying, first with Jean-Claude Juncker, whose appointment as President of the European Commission he opposed, and now with the European Parliament. The Parliament is probably not an institution to which Cameron would instinctively warm (its wasteful dual location does not help), but after alienating many potential supporters five years ago by taking Conservative MEPs out of their natural political habitat, Cameron held separate meetings in the European Parliament this week with all the major groupings; these appear to have been business-like, at least, if not actually cordial.

So chapeau to the new Continental Cameron. Pragmatism calls. Reluctantly perhaps, but this most English of recent UK prime ministers has gone some way to becoming a European. An A* for effort – but to what end?

If this European summit runs true to form, the essentials of a deal should be clear by dawn tomorrow. Then Cameron faces the Cabinet the same afternoon, followed by Parliament on Monday, and the starting gun for the campaign will, at last, be fired. Boris, Theresa, Zac and the rest will all have to come down on one side or the other.

If there is no deal, then Cameron’s European peregrinations go on, with all the ambiguities and the uncertainties that are so damaging to the economy and the UK body politic. Cameron might win points among sceptics for toughness, but that will rebound if he fails to extract terms they regard as better. He has little to gain by holding out.

Whenever the referendum is held, however, there seems to be an ever greater mismatch between its historic significance and the small-print terms on which it will supposedly be decided. On the result hangs nothing less than the future direction of the UK and probably the future of the EU, too. Yet the decision will supposedly hinge on a few billion pounds spent (or not) on subsidies for incoming workers, and on how far the City of London can be insulated from the eurozone.

It will not, of course. Corporate Britain has mostly made up its mind, while a few billion pounds here or there are not going to shift those who are viscerally opposed to the UK ever having been “in Europe”. On the other side, I doubt I am alone in having mixed feelings about the number of EU migrants in low-paying jobs, and objecting to a system where residency, rather than citizenship, is the qualification for most state benefits and yet child benefit for non-resident children is still paid. For all his frantic negotiating, the big question – to stay or to go – will not be swung by whatever Cameron brings back from Brussels.

What will swing it? Deep-seated attitudes that predate the referendum by at least a generation; plus, I fear, a fused vision of EU workers and non-EU migrants and refugees rushing our shores. That the UK is outside the Schengen arrangements and has opted out of any EU quota system for refugees will count for little, so long as there are pictures of desperate people crossing more southern seas. Given the lack of public confidence in our national border and asylum system, the “remain” campaign will have to make the distinction between EU workers, non-EU migrants, and refugees much more cogently than it has done so far.

Paradoxically, all this could perhaps have been avoided. If national sovereignty were the real point of contention, why not follow the German example and pass scrutiny of all laws to a constitutional court or similar. Such a change could have been handled by the UK Parliament with no need for a referendum, no need for haggling with Brussels, and no need for Cameron to traipse around outer Europe.

It has been objected that the UK system precludes such a solution, but why? Our unwritten constitution may be a source of pride, but the mess that attempted reforms have brought – from piecemeal federalism (devolution) to the creation of a Supreme Court – cries out for a process that would speed our constitutional arrangements into the modern age.

This referendum, however, is not primarily about national sovereignty. It is about something more small-minded: a grievance nursed for decades by those voters who feel that, on Europe, they were never asked. he 1975 referendum called only for an existing decision to be endorsed. Not until the in-out (remain-leave) question has been posed, can the country turn to the rest of its unfinished constitutional business. The sooner that happens, the better.