David Cameron is a public relations man.

Really. That was his brief life before politics. So he must know that his timing is disastrous as he bids to woo the European Union ahead of a UK referendum, which runs smack bang up against the Grexit crisis and the wave of African migrants fleeing across the Mediterranean.

There's even the small matter of trouble in Calais to exercise the London media's concerns, as the Prime Minister makes his point in Germany tonight. But the wider crises mean his gripes are bound to be dismissed as piffling, petty point-scoring and thus all the more likely to fall on deaf ears.

But are his own ears deaf to the concerns at home regarding the immensely high-risk gamble he is taking? Or, rather, the gamble his back-benchers and elements of the media are forcing him to take?

Don't take The Herald's word for it. Listen to the soon-to-be chief executive of Standard Life, Keith Skeoch, on Brexit. "This would be a shock that would register about 15 on the Richter scale," he said. He claimed that what he called shifting sands cannot be allowed for a period of investor confidence persisting from up to 30 years.

Earlier this week Chivas chief Laurent Lacassagne said during the opening of the £25 million Dalmunach Distillery on Speyside: "We had the question when the Scottish referendum was debated, and the question of EU membership for Scotland was discussed.

"I would say the same for the UK. The EU has given to our business, like many businesses, the possibility to grow in a very smooth way. It would be a challenge to see those things changing."

The looming EU debate will not be simple. UKIP will make the argument that the whole project is doomed, some in the Tories will join them, Labour will be broadly pro-EU but with a rump sympathetic to Syriza, the LibDems more sympathetic and the SNP even more so, even although some among that party's Left may also have misgivings.

The SNP are, culturally, intensely pro-European, but the party's supposedly social democratic logic must recognise that the EU's record is decidedly mixed, as the current crushing of the Greek anti-austerity party proves. Ms Sturgeon may now be lauding anti-austerity, but that is not the mood of countries such as Ireland and Spain which have taken their medicine and are among those most vociferous against giving a free pass to the Greeks.

Only a maniac would wish to see the dream of European unity crash and burn. Our elder statesmen and stateswomen remember when war ravaged the continent. But our young are far more likely to back anti-austerity parties and see the EU as a rich man's club.

If this view is to be challenged, Europe needs reform, but there is a real dilemma. Right now it is a massive bureaucracy with scant democratic control, something which clearly has to change.

But to democratise Europe is to embrace it. A more democratic, properly federal Europe, is a prize worth striving for, but it does not fit the world view of British exceptionalists threatening withdrawal.