Today David Cameron showed he has some backbone.

Caught between a rock and a hard place, he did what British voters and British MPs expect him to do – which is bat for Britain.

Although he is talking tough, the reality is that he had little option unless he was to limp back with a standard European fudge and then become a discredited Prime Minister in the eyes of his largely Eurosceptic backbenchers.

At best, he would have faced ridicule on all sides. At worst, there would have been an outright rebellion.

He has nailed his colours to the mast and they are the colours of the Union flag, not the European flag.

Having exercised the British veto, he has left his clubmates in the European club hopping up and down.

It is the perfidious Albion of the Thatcher era all over again. But who brought us to this pretty pass in the first place? It was the ideologists and dreamers who promoted the euro, which has proven to be a misconceived project, bringing together the industrial powerhouses of Europe’s northern rim with Mediterranean economies with basket case tax regimes in a doomed marriage.

So keen were the visionaries on this road map to full political and economic union that they even allowed in Greece.

President Sarkozy can whine and thump the table all he likes, but he is one of the architects of the disaster which was founded on a collective burying of heads in the sand.

The euro has been put to the test by the economic storm and has spectacularly proven not to be fit for purpose.

However, so much has been invested in it, both politically and financially, that it cannot be allowed to fail.

There is now a new European landscape, a sort of two-tier Europe comprising those who are in, and those who are out. The European Union has been transformed into that most awkward of beasts, a pushmi-pullyu.

By choosing to be out, Britain now faces the prospect of years of being given the cold shoulder and being unable to influence events by being at “the heart of Europe”.

Some people will ask whether, if Britain is now to have a peripheral role and be treated as some sort of black sheep, the time has come to reassess whether being part of the European club is in Britain’s interests.

David Cameron has taken a step closer to the door.