Or so the thinking goes. But here's the thing: the EU, for all its good points (and there are many), is profoundly, abhorrently undemocratic. The widely acknowledged democratic deficit in the EU has now, thanks to the way member states have denied their people their say on Lisbon, become something approaching a democratic crisis. MEPs are unknown (when did you last read about yours?), unreachable (unless of course you're a lobbyist who can afford to travel to Brussels or Strasbourg on a whim), and unaccountable (the MEPs expenses scandal will dwarf the Westminster one). Now, this distant parliament has strayed even further from its supposed electorate. A European president will now stride across the world stage in the name of millions of citizens who never had the chance to vote for him or her. It may make sense from an organisational viewpoint, but from a democratic one it stinks.

And here is where David Cameron can fight his rearguard action. Lisbon can't be put back in the box, but the European democratic deficit is still very much in play as an issue. The reforms of the Lisbon Treaty may have been necessary to streamline the EU, tackle inefficiencies and iron out some of the other inevitable wrinkles that gather in such a massive system, but the most important reform was left out: to make the EU more democratically accountable to its citizens. A Tory government - or a Liberal Democrat one for that matter, if they would only stop being such European lickspittles - could make the argument not that Lisbon went too far, but that it has not gone far enough. Cameron should call for democratic reforms of the EU as a matter of urgency, with the threat of a British referendum on Europe being called should the EU continue to ignore the democratic rights of their citizens.

This should allow Cameron to placate the Eurosceptics in his party, keep the UK at the heart of Europe, and yet take a firm stand against the European federalists. It's very hard to argue for a democratic deficit; the problem for Cameron, of course, is that if he calls for greater democracy, he will have to mean it.

And so, conference, I can say to you today: in the next parliament, there will be no compulsory ID cards for British citizens.

Gordon Brown, Labour Party Conference 2009

As Alan Travis is already pointing out, Gordon Brown's pledge on ID cards this afternoon was, to all intents and purposes, an outright lie.

There may be no law introduced to make ID cards compulsory, but that's because it's already happening by stealth. Anyone who applies for (or renews) a passport or a driving licence will from 2011 automatically have their details submitted to the National Identity Scheme:

Brown is right to say the ID card will not be compulsory for everybody during the next parliament, but it will in effect be so for the 80% of the population who hold a passport to leave the country.

James Hall, the chief executive of the Identity and Passport Service, has told me that is incorrect. He says you can leave the country without a passport; you just won't be able to get back in again when you come home.

Alan Travis, Gordon Brown's back door to compulsory ID cards

The 'no compulsory ID cards' line received considerable applause from the floor of the conference, presumably because delegates were foolish enough to take the Prime Minister's words at face value. In fact, according to the BBC some in the hall thought that Brown had just announced that the whole ID scheme would be scrapped. I wonder what they'll do when they discover he was saying exactly the opposite.

It is also an act of supreme selfishness on Mr Brown's part. Wrapping himself like some wingless albatross around his administration's throat, starving his own colleagues of oxygen in his mindless determination that other careers should not live in order that his should not die, he has brought his Government and his party to the ground, broken their legs - and yet still will not release his grip. They must crawl on, shackled together, past the humiliation of Thursday's elections and onward for another year: plans jettisoned, policies stalled, Bills postponed, shelving everything bold, all in the name of mere survival. Mr Brown's survival. Never mind Labour's, never mind the future of progressive politics, never mind the ideas and spirits of capable men and women in and around his Cabinet.

Matthew Parris ~ A shell of a man, propelled by anger and pride

But it's not just Labour who stand to lose; what about the country? Worse than an ineffective, drifting government is a Prime Minister who knows his time is running out and is desperate to get back in the game with one swing. Gordon Brown shows every sign that he will seek salvation through legislation, announcing on Friday that he would push ahead with economic rescue, public service reform and (gulp) constitutional renewal.

New Labour has a well-documented tendency to rush out badly-drafted, ill-considered law in order to solve its own public relations problems. How much worse will that get now that the Prime Minister is living in Shitsville? He has already (twice!) undermined Sir Christopher Kelly's independent report on MPs' expenses by suddenly announcing his own arbitrary measures, and now he seems hell-bent on using the British constitution as the vehicle for his personal rehabilitation.

Such a thing cannot, and I think will not, be allowed to happen. We clearly need comprehensive constitutional and electoral reform, but such an undertaking is too important to be left to politicians alone. It has to be separate from government. Although the details of his proposed Council for Democratic Renewal are sketchy, I have a terrible feeling that he will use it to try and dictate reform rather than establish an open, independent and inclusive process for debating and agreeing changes to our system.

Perhaps tonight's European election results will be so bad for Labour that Gordon will not survive; but I doubt it. If the loss of every single Labour council in England didn't shift him, why would a collapse in Labour's European voteshare shame him into going?

But there's always hope. Citizen K will be watching the results with interest.

It did not relate to military, policing or intelligence matters. It did not expose anyone to a risk of injury or death. Nor, in many respects, was it highly confidential.

Much of it was known to others outside the Civil Service, for example, in the security industry or the Labour Party or Parliament. Moreover, some of the information leaked undoubtedly touched on matters of legitimate public interest, which were reported in the press.

It's a nice irony that Bob Quick, the police officer who decided the leaks were important enough to justify an invasion of the House of Commons and the arrest of an opposition frontbench MP, was himself responsible for a leak that actually did relate to "military, policing, or intelligence matters" and was "highly confidential".

That breach of security, calamitous though it was, was a careless oversight. He resigned and that was the end of the matter.

He has far more serious questions to answer about the Damian Green affair, and why he felt it was at all appropriate for the police to take such an active (and dramatic) role in the Home Office leaks investigation.

Damian Green (left) and Bob Quick (right)

Everything about the police's involvement suggests a lack of independence from government and a willingness to use their powers to protect the government's political agenda or prevent political embarrassment.

For one thing, there was no reason to treat it as a police matter in the first place; even though the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office called them in about potential national security leaks, the police could (and should) have looked at the facts and told them to handle it as an internal Home Office disciplinary matter.

Even once the police had become involved, there was no need for them to pursue it with the zealous fervour they did. Having ascertained that a junior civil servant was passing non-confidential information to an opposition MP, the police could simply have given the information they had gathered to the Home Office and let them handle it themselves as a non-criminal matter.

What they did instead was to root around in common law for any offence they could charge Mr Green with (even if the chances of getting a conviction were vanishingly remote), launch a series of highly visible, highly disruptive, and highly distressing raids on offices and homes, and then arrest Damian Green for "aiding and abetting misconduct in public office" and "conspiring to commit misconduct in a public office".

Faced with the inevitable public uproar, the Met and the Home Office gently spun the suggestion that there might be something altogether more serious than the simple leaking of immigration statistics. There were hints to the media that more serious breaches, possibly to do with national security, had been committed or were on the verge of being committed. Now, of course, this is shown to have been a self-serving campaign of lies.

The trajectory that Bob Quick decided on was always going to lead to headlines, scandal and potential embarassment for the police. He could have changed tack or put the brakes on at any time, but he didn't, which suggests either that he is stupid beyond previously known limits (unlikely) or that he was driven primarily by the government's desire, not simply to avoid embarrassing leaks, but to punish their political opponents and dissuade any such opposition in future. Whether this was a conscious or unconscious motive matters less than the possibility that the police allowed themselves to become the government's private enforcers in parliament.

Jacqui Smith is today trotting out the defensive line that action needed to be taken to stop the Home Office leaks. That may well be the case, but the problem is that there is a huge disparity between the action that was needed and the action that was taken.

An inquiry is needed to find out why the police were called in at all, and why they then proceeded to behave like the government's heavies rather than an independent police force.