Nick Herbert, chief executive of Business for Sterling, gets very irate at "suggestions that all euro-sceptics are right-wing fox-hunting types". Part of the problem is that he fits, at least partly, the stereotype. For years he led the Field Sports Society, whose chief campaign was to prevent the banning of fox-hunting. Indeed, Mr Herbert's biggest task has not, as he suggests, been to get across the message that business is not pro-euro. It is, rather, to dispel the public view that those who are against the euro are bug-eyed little-Englanders.
Mr Herbert was gleeful this week at an own-goal scored by Britain in Europe, the pro-euro group, which claimed that eight million jobs would be lost if Britain left the European Union. Mr Martin Weale, the economist on whose work the entirely spurious claim was based, was so furious that he boycotted the launch of the group's new campaign: "Out of Europe, Out of Work".
Of course, the really bizarre aspect of this row is that no serious commentator is suggesting that Britain ought to leave the EU. The water was muddied when Prime Minister Mr Tony Blair insisted that the group widen its remit from campaigning for Britain's euro membership to promoting the benefits of EU membership before he would share their platform last October.
The euro-sceptics are ahead in the PR battle. Foreign Secretary, Mr Robin Cook, is one of the only ministers who will speak openly in favour of the euro. No one in the Cabinet is thought to be anti-euro, but Chancellor, Mr Gordon Brown, Home Secretary, Mr Jack Straw and indeed Mr Blair himself are all intensely nervous of populist opposition to the single currency, which appears to be growing. The success of the anti-euro movement is largely to do with Business for Sterling. Its research director, Mr Dominic Cummings, is described by one admirer as "head of guerrilla warfare". Mr Cummings spent many years in Russia, studying Leninist propaganda. He holds that the left has conquered intellectuals because it had superior propaganda, and that the right needs slogans just as powerful as ones like: "Loot the looters".
One candidate is: "Britain is a global nation". Another supporter says: "We're on the edge of Europe, which is the best place to be".
The tabloid press may run their campaign under the Union Jack, but Mr Herbert asserts that eurosceptics are not monoglot xenophobes. Whether they are little-Englander or not, Business for Sterling, and the anti-euro campaign in general, contain more than their fair share of rightwingers. For one, Conservative leader Mr William Hague has purged the Tory front-bench so that it is now stuffed with hardline euro-sceptics, of whom the most prominent example is Mr Michael Portillo, the shadow chancellor. On Business for Sterling's council is Lord Howell of Guildford, a cabinet minister in Margaret Thatcher's government, albeit one who was sacked for being too "wet", and Sir Stanley Kalms, the chairman of Dixons, and a famous exponent of old-style management techniques.
The euro-sceptics claim that more "real" business people are euro-sceptic. Business for Sterling, which is supported by individual donation, is backed by the Federation of Small Businesses and the Institute of Directors, which is seen as the main voice of medium-sized companies. The group has had a running battle with the Confederation of British Industry, the voice of "big business". That battle has quietened down after the replacement of Adair Turner, an urbane former McKinsey consultant, by Digby Jones, a Midlands accountant. Business for Sterling ran a battle of attrition against Mr Turner during his three-year term of office. They claimed that the CBI's opinion polls were flawed. (More recent polls suggest that business opinion on the euro is finely balanced.) Mr Jones has called a ceasefire, and the CBI's new catchphrase is "Europe, not the euro".
Two of the economists most associated with the Thatcherite era, Tim Congdon and Patrick Minford, the dry-as-dust monetarist, also back Business for Sterling. However, Mr Herbert is keen to parade two left-leaning economists: Dr James Forder, a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and Mr Tony Thirlwall of the University of Kent. Dr Forder, a Keynesian, wrote an anti-euro tract called: "The Other Side of the Coin".
Then there is Sir John Coles, former head of the diplomatic corps, who joined Business for Sterling shortly after his retirement. The author of a booklet entitled Real Influence, Sir John's thesis is that Britain should not seek to influence policy by being "one of the gang", and horse-trading in late-night cabals. Instead, he holds that Britain should lead by example - by having a flexible labour market, and low unemployment, for example. But can it be a coincidence that many of those who are euro-sceptic are also deeply sceptical of the new Labour project? Or that the right-wing press - the daily and Sunday Telegraphs, the daily and Sunday Times, both Mails and the Sun - line up behind the pound?
George Trefgarne, financial correspondent on the Daily Tele- graph, is typical. The heir to a hereditary peer who served as a junior defence minister in Mrs Thatcher's government, Mr Trefgarne is as hostile to the euro as he is to new Labour's attempted rebranding of Britain as "cool Britannia". Boris Johnson, a pudgy blond Old Etonian who edits the rightwing Spectator magazine, used a diatribe against the euro in the Telegraph for a sideswipe against Cherie Booth. The Prime Minister's wife, who, with her Liverpudlian roots and her suspected republican leanings, stands for much that the Tory establishment despises.
On the Times, it is a similar story: the whole leader-writing team is staunchly anti-euro, as is Patience Wheatcroft, the City editor. Anatole Kaletsky, the paper's respected economics commentator, and Michael Gove, a thirty-something Scot who debated at Trinity College, Dublin during his student days at the Oxford Union, are also firmly against the single currency. The lobby team is believed to lean towards new Labour - this is not unusual - lobby journalists find their job a lot easier if they work with the grain of government rather than against.
The euro-sceptic movement claims that many celebrities are against the single currency, but that they have not yet been used on the campaign. Johnny Vaughan, the iconic and surprisingly clever presenter of the Big Breakfast, a hip morning programme, (and an old boy of Ampleforth, one of Britain's leading Catholic public schools) is sceptical. So is Carol Vorderman, TV's maths expert, who also writes an e-commerce column for the euro-phile Mirror. So is Ian Botham who, despite his advancing years and a past reputation for bad behaviour, is still a hero to many. And it would not be hard to imagine that the Spice Girls, who declared Mrs Thatcher to be one of the primary exponents of Girl Power, to be sterling loyalists too.
To be fair to the euro-sceptics, their cause is shared by centrists and even left-wingers. A new group, the somewhat confusingly titled New Europe, was set up last year as a home for centrist eurosceptics. It is led by Lord Owen, who as David Owen was joint leader of the Liberal Democrats. Malcolm Rifkind, the former Tory foreign secretary who lost his Edinburgh seat at the last general election, has lent his name to the cause, as has Frank Field, the maverick Labour MP who was sacked from his job as pensions minister a year into this parliament. Lord Healey, who as Denis Healey was deputy Labour leader under the unashamedly socialist Michael Foot and is a former chancellor, is also a supporter.
Martin Taylor, the former chief executive of Barclays, the clearing bank, and chairman of WHSmith, the chain of newsagents, is perhaps New Europe's highest profile business supporter. He has been assumed to have leftish leanings, having chaired a commission on integrating the tax and benefits systems for the new Labour government. Janet Bush, formerly economics correspondent of the Times, and an assumed new Labour supporter, also works for the cause.
Trade unionists, inheritors of the old anti-Common Market mantle, are against the euro by a ratio of two-to-one. Indeed, two of the biggest unions, the Transport & General Workers' Union, headed by Bill Morris, and Unison, the public service union, are also the most implacably opposed to the single currency. They are afraid that British entry into the single currency would lead to job cuts. In their view, the euro is part of a project that includes privatisation and lower public spending - in other words the sort of reforms that many countries had to endure to satisfy the Maastricht criteria for joining the single currency.
The trade union movement's opposition to the euro is organised and underpinned by a ginger group, Trade Unions Against the Single Currency, which is effective in building up grass roots opposition to the euro. Despite many lingering associations with the right, opposition to the single currency is growing in Britain. The Daily Telegraph's George Trefgarne sums it up: "Sterling is cool".
Margaret Doyle is finance correspondent of the Economist. Any views expressed here are entirely her own.
