The BBC's excellent two-part series, Europe: 'Them or Us', looking at the UK's often troubled relationship with the European institutions, repeatedly returned to David Cameron aping Harold Wilson's tactical management of an issue that split Labour in the 1970s.

In the early Seventies Wilson proposed a remain/leave referendum on renegotiated terms of the then EEC. It was an attempt to hold Labour's warring factions together and to keep the show on the road. Nick Robinson reminded viewers that David Cameron was in essence pulling the same stunt.

The historical analogy is inevitable even if simplistically presented. In truth the management of the two situations is widely different. Although parliamentary sovereignty was an issue that united elements of the Left and Right in the 1970s, the political crossover is much more restricted now. Most of the Labour movement is sanguine about the limitations of Westminster's legislative reach. For many Conservatives though the issue is now the closest thing they have to an uncompromising article of faith.

In the 1970s Labour were the Party whose splits ran deeper. But even then they did not run as deep as the Conservative Party of today. True, Tribunites like Barbara Castle, Michael Foot and Tony Benn saw Europe as a 'bosses club' and unelected officials as an affront to the basic principles of democracy.

It is equally true that on the Labour Right, Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams and George Thomson did not view sovereignty as the "ark of the Covenant of Socialism" as Jenkins once elegantly put it. But the bigger truth is that most of the Parliamentary Labour Party (Wilson and James Callaghan included) could not get terribly worked up about Europe. Indeed, Labour's most famous revisionist of the time, Anthony Crosland, could not care less one way or the other. Those dynamics are a world away from the fratricide of the current Parliamentary Conservative Party.

Then there are the management skills of the two respective prime ministers. Harold Wilson was a class act, a political Houdini who sometimes cajoled, sometimes stayed silent, often played sides against one another and critically had thought out every move on the political chess board. What often appeared expedient and opportunistic was in fact the best laid plan. Wilson had a cunning which left colleagues concluding he had outmanoeuvred everyone. They only realised it when Wilson had moved on to the management of some other crisis. Shirley Williams rightly regards his stewardship of the referendum issue as absolutely brilliant.

David Cameron is no Harold Wilson. Whatever else is obvious about the current bout of Euro fever afflicting the Conservatives, it is that Mr Cameron's party will emerge even more divided after June 23. By announcing an in/out referendum, Cameron was postponing a certain civil war with no fallback strategy for uniting his troops. Harold Wilson correctly judged that if Labour won in 1974 his MPs would be busy with the business of government rather than fighting the battles of opposition. His trouble-makers in chief on Europe, the aforementioned Tribunites plus Peter Shore, were all given Cabinet posts. The shackles of Cabinet responsibility were cutely played. Jim Callaghan nominally presided over a non-renegotiation and the rest is history.

The contribution of Helmut Schmidt to the BBC programme did nothing to crush Wilson's reputation for slipperiness. What it did reveal was a leader who played his hand when he had engineered circumstances that ensured that hand was a winning one. As Shirley Williams recounted on Wilson's death, "As a party leader he was right at the top. The unity of the party was all and that put restrictions on what he could achieve as a prime minister. In the end, he put the interest of the party even above the national interest."

Now, a charitable reading of David Cameron's predicament might say he is putting the national interest, as he sees it, above the interests of his party. A more brutal assessment might mark the folly of conceding a referendum the roots of which might destroy the unity and ultimately the credibility of his party when in government. Wilson would never have made such an error.

Analysis by Bernard Ponsonby, STV's political editor. He joined the station in 1990 and became political editor in 2000. He has presented most election, by-election, and results programmes over the last quarter-century.