EU referendum - Deferring vote would be sensible

Politics is, as we have been assured so very often, the art of the possible.

That definition recognises the appropriateness of flexibility and points to the great stupidity of intransigence and how stasis handcuffs the pragmatism that can improve people’s lives.

Though our Government has set a date — May 31 — for a referendum on the EU fiscal compact, events are conspiring, as Harold Macmillan once warned they do, to suggest that there are strong arguments to defer that inevitable day of reckoning.