No one can complain that France, as it completes its six-month spell in charge of the European Union, isn’t extracting every last drop of blood, sweat and tears from the officials and diplomats based in Brussels and EU national capitals.

A recent meeting on climate change and energy policy, attended by deputy ambassadors from the EU’s 27 member-states, started at 10:00 on a Friday morning - usually the quietest day of the EU’s working week, when it is not unknown for some staff to slip away for an early weekend. At French insistence, this meeting did not end until a bone-creaking, ghost-eyed 6:00 on Saturday morning.

Old-timers in Brussels calculate that Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s president, has staged more EU summits since July 1 than any previous leader in the bloc’s 50-year history. What’s more, there are rumours that he won’t be satisfied even after the last scheduled summit of France’s EU presidency wraps up its work in Brussels on December 12. Diplomats are bracing themselves for a possible final French summons at some point before December 31.

All of which, from the point of view of your average hard-working Eurocrat, underlines the importance of having easy access to a good coffee machine to help you stay awake. It’s just as well, then, that the French aren’t holding their meetings in the European Commission headquarters.

For twenty newly installed, state-of-the-art coffee makers have just been hurriedly withdrawn from the Commission HQ after an employee discovered his coffee was contaminated with extraordinarily high levels of nickel. How much was spent on the machines? About 100,000 euros.

December 4, 2008 4:23pm in Commission, France | Comment