DAILY MAIL COMMENT: Why is the PM frit?

David Cameron is refusing to take part in any of the head-to-head TV debates during the EU referendum campaign

So then, with a thoroughly depressing disregard for both democracy and the British electorate, David Cameron refuses to take part in any of the head-to-head TV debates during the EU referendum campaign.

His decision is not just cowardly. It is an abrogation of his prime ministerial duty, which is to face his opponents in open debate, so the arguments can be probed and tested before the largest possible number of voters.

For evidence of this look to America where the presidential debates are an integral part of their democratic process. Often brutal, they can be electrifying – providing tantalising insights into the candidates’ character and policies.

For Mr Cameron the Mail has one question: if he is so convinced of the merits of his case for staying in the EU, why does he lack the confidence to argue that case against either Boris Johnson or Michael Gove?

After all, this week the PM suggested Brexit supporters are immoral. Isn’t there a certain kind of immorality in making such a charge and then refusing to defend it in public debate?

No, the suspicion must be that the Prime Minister knows he has so recklessly exaggerated the arguments in favour of remaining in the EU, and has engaged in such blatant scaremongering, that he fears exposure at the hands of a debater as skilled as Mr Johnson or Mr Gove.

And there is a lengthening list of huge questions on which Mr Cameron needs to be subjected to the most searching examination. He must be measured against the standards which he himself set in his famous Bloomberg speech in January 2013.

On that occasion, he declared that ‘more of the same’ will not secure a long-term future for the EU, which is why ‘we need fundamental, far-reaching change’.

Does Mr Cameron honestly think that in his renegotiation, he achieved any concession which can conceivably be described as ‘fundamental, far-reaching change’? No wonder he stopped talking about it as soon as possible. In the same speech, Mr Cameron said: ‘Of course Britain could make her own way in the world, outside the EU, if we chose to do so.’

Is this still his view? And if so, how in Heaven’s name does he square it with his recent apocalyptic warnings of the consequences of Brexit?

When Mr Cameron warned that leaving the EU would heighten the risk of genocide and European war, does he not accept that the continent today is more riven by hatred and division than at any time since 1945 – precisely because of the EU’s misguided policies on migration and the economy?

Again, on the economic front, Mr Cameron and George Osborne have been painting an apocalyptic picture for jobs and house prices if we vote to leave.

What they don’t say is that many economies in EU countries are basket cases where massive unemployment and poverty is being imposed by a German-dominated Brussels machine. Why do we want to stay in such a broken club?

For Mr Cameron the Mail has one question: if he is so convinced of the merits of his case for staying in the EU, why does he lack the confidence to argue that case against either Boris Johnson (left) or Michael Gove (right)?

Might not Brexit instead prove comparable – as Alex Brummer argued in a magisterial analysis in yesterday’s Mail – to Britain’s departure in 1992 from the Exchange Rate Mechanism, which the Europhiles assured us would be a catastrophe, but which actually ushered in many years of economic growth?

Mr Cameron has suborned (some would say prostituted) our supposedly neutral Civil Service and state institutions to paint this apocalyptic picture of Britain outside the EU.

Many of the claims of this governmental behemoth have been at best dubious, at worst mendacious. Surely, in the name of democracy, he should have the conviction to debate them with the leaders of the Out campaign.

This paper has often, in the past, admired the PM’s fortitude and courage. That’s why, in this instance, we are mystified at his pusillanimity.

Doesn’t he realise that it lays him open to the charge, to use the language of his heroine Lady Thatcher, of being frit?