Facing ever-increasing pressure from UKIP and the euroskeptic majority within his own party, a supplementary bill from Brussels for the best part of $3 billion (payable within weeks) is not exactly what David Cameron needed.

The Guardian reports:

Britain has been told it must pay an extra €2.1bn (£1.7bn) into the European Union budget by the end of next month because the UK economy is doing better relative to other European economies….British and European commission officials confirmed that the Treasury had been told last week that budget contribution calculations based on gross national income (GNI) adjustments carried out by Eurostat, the EU statistics agency, had exposed a huge discrepancy between what Britain had been asked to contribute and what it should be paying, because of the UK’s recovery. The bombshell, first reported by the Financial Times, was dropped into the middle of an EU summit in Brussels where Cameron and 27 other leaders were mired in tough negotiations over climate-change policy and attempts to agree big reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.
A Downing Street source said: “It’s not acceptable to just change the fees for previous years and demand them back at a moment’s notice. The European commission was not expecting this money and does not need this money and we will work with other countries similarly affected to do all we can to challenge this.”
The prime minister on Thursday evening conferred with Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, as the Netherlands has also been ordered to pay more than €600m extra into the budget, while other countries such as Germany and France are likely to have excess contributions returned.
The commission told the various countries of the revamped figures on 17 October, EU officials said. They said the British had until 1 December to provide €2.1bn, roughly a fifth of the UK’s annual net contribution to the EU.

The full story is quite a bit more complicated than that (it’s not really a matter of Britain being penalized for “doing better”). As so often, over at EUReferendum Richard North has done his homework. Read the whole thing, but here’s a key extract:

With Britain’s annual contribution to the EU now linked to GNI as a result of Mrs Thatcher’s endeavours, this made it inevitable that, with the GNI increasing under the new, UN-mandated system of accounting, Britain’s contribution was going to increase.
It is thus all very well for Mr Cameron to huff and puff about refusing to pay a “completely unacceptable” bill, but he has no grounds to do so. The original system was agreed by Margaret Thatcher. Amendments were approved by Tony Blair’s government and Gordon Brown in 2007, making them equally responsible, and the new system of accounting was agreed by Mr Cameron’s own government last year.
Thus, Mrs Merkel was absolutely right. Mr Cameron should not have been in the least surprised by the £1.7bn additional bill. This is nothing to do with the improvement in the British economy – it simply reflects a change in the accounting procedure, which has been on the stocks for two decades, the effects of which were predictable five years ago.
Although one is concerned for the poor benighted taxpayer, therefore, there can be no sympathy for Mr Cameron. This is the man who is in favour of continued membership of the EU: all he had to do was read the 727-page regulations which his government approved, or the 655-page explanatory document produced by Eurostat. He would then have known exactly where the UK stood.
But, of course, detail is not something Cameron does. And so, once again, this most careless of politicians is faced with a crisis that he should have seen coming but didn’t, a crisis that will be all the worse politically (if not financially: the bill was always coming) for the Tories by its leader’s characteristic failure to prepare for it.

So what to do?

Taking, as usual, their notes from Brussels, the stenographers who pass as editorial writers at the Financial Times soothe that this is nothing more than a little local difficulty:

Not for the first time, the prime minister’s rage against the EU is an exaggerated response to what is a somewhat modest issue.

Somewhat modest?

If Cameron were in any real sense a euroskeptic this demand could very easily be transformed into a “beneficial crisis” (to borrow that splendidly cynical Brussels term) infuriating enough to persuade still hesitant Brits that it’s time to quit the EU. And to start that process now.

But Cameron is not in any real sense a euroskeptic. He continues to peddle the destructive myth (destructive because so many Brits still believe in it) that it is possible for the U.K. to remain within an EU where its position has been “renegotiated,” a myth that Angela Merkel helpfully trashed yet again over the weekend.

Under the logic — such as it is — of that myth, Cameron will be compelled to challenge this latest Brussels demand from within the intellectual, political, and legal structure of the EU. And that cannot be done in a way that has a scrap of intellectual or legal coherence. That leaves only the exercise of pure political muscle, something that the hapless Cameron, outmaneuvered and outclassed in battle after battle with the EU, simply does not have.

Writing in the Daily Mail, James Forsyth (the editor of the Spectator) seems to think otherwise:

I understand that [Cameron] is ready to push the button on the nuclear option of blocking the measures needed by the Eurozone countries to stave off the coming crisis there unless this demand is dropped. One Number 10 source declared defiantly: ‘We’re going to fight and fight on this one.’

I’d be amazed if they really did. What Cameron will do is “shout and shout” until the 2015 election is over. I doubt if the voters will be impressed.

The result then of all this? UKIP gets a boost, the Tories’ (impossible) dream of an election victory takes yet another knock and the chances of europhile “Red Ed” Milliband getting into Number 10 Downing Street in May have risen still higher.

Oddly enough, he’s the man that Brussels would like to see in charge.

Just a coincidence, I’m sure.