CABINET-rank ministers, in an unprecedented revolt against the official party line, are daring to suggest Britain might walk out of Europe.
Meanwhile Tory MPs with marginal seats are squealing in alarm at polls showing UKIP’s campaign for an IN-or-OUT referendum has won huge public support.
Could the two developments by any chance be related?
Conservatives have suddenly woken up to the increasingly probability that my party will win the 2014 European elections.
More to the point, they are terrified Mr Cameron will be robbed again of outright victory in 2015 as Tory voters choose us or stay home.
In any case, can we believe a word “Cast Iron Dave” says about a referendum after his previous broken promise?
The Prime Minister and his Foreign Secretary, William Hague, are rattling sabres at Brussels and demanding the return of sovereign power over welfare, immigration and justice.
But what, as Michael Gove asks, do we do if they say NO?
The Eurosceptic Education Secretary says we can walk out.
But that is not what Mr Cameron thinks or says.
He is on the record insisting categorically that he will never lead a campaign for Britain to leave Europe.
So say Labour’s Ed Miliband and the Lib Dems’ Nick Clegg.
Which means all this referendum talk is hot air.
If they do try and bring back hundreds of important powers ceded to Brussels over the years, Brussels will certainly say NO.
With the Euro in flames, why would they turn a drama into an existential crisis by allowing Britain to unravel their carefully tied Gordian knot?
Our relationship with the EU underpins almost everything that happens in Britain today, from how our doctors are trained and how they work, to whether the WI and Red Cross volunteers can sell jam at their fundraising fetes.
It tells us what to grow, how to fish, it tells us who we can trade with and how we should employ people.
It decides on our holidays, on our lightbulbs, it regulates how to use ladders and whether we can kick out terrorists through the European Court of Human Rights, now an integral part of the European Union.
They know a victorious Cameron negotiation would lead inevitably to other member states demanding similar or different concessions.
This is precisely contrary to everything those gravy-train Eurocrats have been beavering away for over the last four decades.
They have not gathered enormous and continually expanding power to the centre in order to give it back, ever.
Perhaps Mr Cameron secretly hopes to encourage a slap in the face from EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso as a pretext for a proper IN-OUT referendum.
Perhaps he is more of a Eurosceptic than anyone had previously believed.
If so, his bluff will certainly be called.
Mr Barroso has learned nothing and forgotten nothing since his days as a firebrand Maoist agitator.
Just last month he confirmed what was long suspected but always denied — that the EU can only survive as a full-blown federal superstate.
Anyone who gets in the way of this Grand Project will be cast aside or crushed.
Under a new EU Treaty, Brussels will demand absolute loyalty from member states — one country, one army, one treasury, one flag, one anthem, one loyalty and one future.
Some sceptics, such as Open Europe, oppose a referendum because they are nervous voters might lock us in forever because they are too fearful of being outside.
Quite the reverse.
With the Euro disintegrating, unemployment soaring, pensions and prosperity in freefall, there is more likely to be a stampede for the exit, with others in hot pursuit.
Once out we would be free to float and flourish.
With a population soon set to exceed Germany’s, Britain would be too big a market to ignore, still less punish.
Europe is an outdated economic and political union which, as it stands, cannot compete in a fast-changing world economy.
Britain would not simply survive outside, we would flourish.
And the sooner we have that chance, the better.
