A letter from Lord Parkinson, the Tory chairman, to all constituency offices asking them to check that their members had received their papers generated around 2,000 calls from people complaining that they had not.As chaos threatened to descend into farce last weekend, officials admitted that less than 6 per cent of the ballot papers had been returned. By yesterday, the proportion of Tories who had voted was far higher. But the turnout is still likely to be less than the 80 per cent demanded by pro-Europeans like Ian Taylor. Even Mr Hague’s closest allies said only 50 per cent would be a “dream scenario”.THERE WAS no doubt about which way the grassroots would vote – private polling done by the Tory leader’s allies in advance had found that 81 per cent of the party’s members supported the Hague line. Officials are hoping that they will beat the 65-35 split by which Tony Blair forced through Labour his proposal to scrap the party’s sacred cow of Clause IV.But that will not be enough.

Former cabinet ministers on the pro-European wing of the party are now openly criticising Mr Hague almost as viciously as the Eurosceptics attacked John Major. Stephen Dorrell, the former health secretary, who will tell the conference that the ballot result has done nothing to change his mind, said last week: “If you think of the Conservative Party as a brand, what did people associate it with but rows about Europe? This ballot just perpetuates that image.” Ian Taylor, another former minister, condemned the ballot as a “misjudgement” on the level of “student politics”. “The issue isn’t closed, so the ballot cannot close it,” he said. “If Hague doesn’t get a turnout of 80 per cent that confirms our view that we ought to be continuing to discuss the issue.”The Tory leader sees his ballot on the single currency as comparable to Blair’s battle to scrap Labour’s historic commitment to state ownership. His allies say that the critics will then become the Tony Benns of their party – “still harping on about it but ignored” But the Tory referendum is very different. It is not, despite the dismissal of the “dinosaurs”, a battle of old and new, it is a genuine difference of opinion.

It is also less guaranteed to endear the Tories to the country.Whatever else it achieves, the referendum will ensure that attention at the Tory party conference in Bournemouth is once again focused on splits over Europe. Those differences can be traced back to Margaret Thatcher’s Bruges speech 10 years ago this month. In her address – the sacred text of Euroscepticism – she spoke famously of Europe as a “family of nations”. She also told her listeners: “Utopia never comes because we know we should not like it if it did.” The same could be said of unity in her party..