Torn apart? Not exactly...
As predicted, David Cameron was not torn limb from limb by a pack of baying backbenchers. He may not have been greeted by cheers and the waving of order papers, but when his Eurosceptics rose, they mostly directed their fire at Labour.
Bill Cash, the veteran of the Maastricht Treaty rebellions, who now chairs the , raised the point I quoted in my earlier post, about Paragraph 34 of the Task Force report, and a well-prepared prime minister cited several other paragraphs, and quoted from the summit conclusions, to bolster his view that there is nothing for Britain to fear, and much to welcome in the eurozone putting its house in order.
Behind him, several of his backbenchers, notably Douglas Carswell, were scribbling industriously.
The PM made several significant points. He didn't see European treaty changes, that simply put the emergency measures created to bail out Greece and other troubled eurozone member states onto a permanent footing, as a matter for a UK referendum. He repeated several times that he would hold a referendum for treaty changes that took power from Westminster - and insisted this did not fall into that category.
Second, he said that a treaty change of that kind was too minor to be used to leverage other changes desired by his backbenchers. That will disappoint those who hoped to see him take the opportunity to extract concessions from the EU and maybe repatriate powers from it. I'm not clear from the exchanges - maybe a reading of Hansard tomorrow will help - whether that applies to the Franco-German proposal for a new framework for the eurozone.
Ed Miliband, meanwhile, didn't deliver any real surprises - helpfully promising Mr Cameron support against his backbenchers. No damascene conversion to euroscepticism was detectable today.
I'm Mark D'Arcy and I'll be writing about what goes on in the chambers and committee rooms at Westminster.
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