It should go without saying that an MP’s strongest – perhaps his only - real duty is to his electorate. It is all of you who put me in Parliament, and –difficult as that can sometimes be – it is my duty to speak and vote and act in a way which I believe that most of you would want. So when 100,000 people took advantage of the Government’s new e-petition system to demand a debate on an EU Referendum, I was faced with a choice. Should I vote with the motion, or against it? It may sound a little old-fashioned, but I thought I would just ask all of you what you thought. I put a poll on my website (jamesgray.org), which told me that 89% of those voting wanted me to support calls for a referendum. I emailed all the members of the North Wiltshire Conservative Association – 84% of them want a referendum; we chewed the issue over at length during my Political Supper Club in Royal Wootton Bassett on Friday, and 95% of those present wanted it; and I have received dozens of letters in favour, only a tiny handful against, most of them simply arguing that the time is not right. My mandate was plain. So as a loyalist and true Conservative, it was with a heavy heart that I rebelled against the whips and David Cameron and joined 80 of my Tory colleagues to vote for such a referendum.

The issue seems to me very straightforward. 40 years ago –in a referendum- we voted to be a member of a Common European market. That has transformed itself like some kind of Sci Fi monster into the overblown, interfering monster which is today’s European Union. The 65 million people of Britain with one heritage and the outlook of an island nation are a logical unit of Government. We don’t want to be part of some kind of United States of Europe. We want decisions on business regulation, law and order, defence and foreign affairs to be decided not in Brussels but in Westminster, so that if we don’t like what we get we can chuck the offending Government out at the next General Election.

The – entirely predictable – crisis in the Eurozone gives us our chance fundamentally to renegotiate our membership of this unloved and unwieldy EU. The Eurozone countries will need a new Treaty if they are to dig themselves out of the mess they have got themselves into, and any such treaty will need the UK’s vote for its ratification.   So let us now say loud and clear to the EU that we want no part of their currency, we do not accept their rules and regulations over business, health and safety, human rights and the rest. We do not accept that they can have a foreign or defence policy. All we want is a free trade area covering the Continent from Ireland to the Urals. Let us do business together; but let it stop at that. Europe is a nice place to go on holiday, and then to return to a free and independent UK.

‘In Europe, but not run by it.’ Or even better ‘Near Europe, and trading with it.’