As it stands now, a consensus has been, more or less, established that the 2016 British referendum on the United Kingdom’s continued membership in the European Union was held primarily due to the steadily increasing pressure of the Conservative parliamentary party’s hard Eurosceptic wing that had demanded it. This article deals with agenda setting within the Conservative Party, whilst applying the issue capture concept, first introduced by Nathaniel Copsey and Tim Haughton in 2014 in connection with their research into the
British debate on the EU and the European integration per se. The author argues that the issue capture phenomenon occurred also within the Conservative Party, when the minority group of its hard Eurosceptic members calling for an in/out referendum took near-control of the terms of the intra-party political debate and gradually put this issue through as a central point of the party’s programme. The article aims to answer the question, why it was the demand for an in/out referendum that became the central issue of the Conservative hard Eurosceptic wing.