DAVID CAMERON has snubbed Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, by refusing to attend important talks with right-of-centre EU party leaders tomorrow.

Ten prime ministers and 15 party leaders, including Frau Merkel, the most powerful political figure in Europe, will attend the talks at the traditional eve-of-EU summit gathering at Meise Castle outside Brussels. It is being hosted by the European People’s Party, a family of right-wing national political parties that Mr Cameron has promised to leave because it is too federalist.

Among the other guests are Nicolas Sarkozy, the French Interior Minister and Presidential hopeful, José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, and Jan Peter Balkenende, the Prime Minister of the Netherlands.

This is the second time Mr Cameron has refused to attend the meeting since becoming leader, leading to accusations from them that he is isolationist. When they last met in December, just after Mr Cameron was elected leader, he said he was too busy. On Thursday Mr Cameron will attend events to mark the Queen’s 80th birthday and an awards ceremony.

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have taken every opportunity to rub shoulders with Frau Merkel, visiting her on separate occasions in Berlin. They see her as an ally on economic reform of the EU.

Mr Cameron risks being frozen out by the German Chancellor and other senior right-of-centre politicians are likely to follow her lead. She has already made clear her displeasure at his pledge to pull Tory MEPs out of the EPP. “Of course he’ll miss out,” an EPP spokesman said. “If he wants to be connected to the main centre-right parties in Europe, that is where he should be.”

Mr Cameron is thought never to have been to Brussels on official business and has certainly not attended since becoming leader. In January he went to Paris to see M Sarkozy and has been to Prague to see the leaders of the centre-right ODS party.

William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard all attended the pre-summit EPP gatherings even though they were fiercely Eurosceptic.

Mr Cameron promised during the Tory leadership campaign to pull his MEPs out of the group, an article of faith for right-wing Tories, who despise the EPP’s federalist leanings. Critics say that Mr Cameron made the pledge only to win support from rightwingers during the leadership contest, but Mr Cameron’s allies say he genuinely believes that the party cannot be part of the alliance.

He has instructed William Hague, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, to form a new right-wing group to push for far-reaching reforms of the EU and modernise its trading relationship with the United States. A trawl around Central and Eastern Europe for prospective new partners has, however, failed to uncover the group of serious new Eurosceptic partners that Mr Cameron had hoped for.

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