Brussels blog

So it looks as if it is to be Herman Van Rompuy, Belgium’s prime minister, as the full-time president, and Catherine Ashton, Britain’s EU trade commissioner, as the foreign policy supremo.  This is the culmination of eight years of efforts, starting with the EU’s Laeken Declaration of 2001, to reform the bloc’s institutions and give the EU a more dynamic world profile.

Carl Bildt, Sweden’s foreign minister, thinks the EU had a historic opportunity in its grasp and flunked it – at least as far as the full-time presidency is concerned.  The British government itself was saying more or less the same thing until tonight.  It was adamant that the EU needed a big-hitter as president to convince the rest of the world that the EU was going places.  Now it has participated in a classic EU trade-off that has produced exactly the result it said would be no use to anyone.

But the British are no more complicit in these decisions than the French, the Germans and everyone else.  Fernch President Nicolas Sarkozy switched his support to Van Rompuy from Tony Blair, the ex-premier of the UK.  Germany, conscious of its traditional role as an ally to the EU’s smallest countries, never really wanted Blair in the first place.  And in many ways, they were right about Blair – but for the wrong reasons.  He came with an awful lot of baggage – not just the Iraq war, but the way his actions too often failed to match his words when it came to Britain’s national neurosis over the EU.

So perhaps the real difficulty was that no other “big-hitter” put forward his or her candidacy for the presidency.  We had, as far as I recall, someone from Luxembourg, someone from Estonia, someone from Latvia, someone from Ireland, someone from Finland…  No Frenchman, German, Italian or Spaniard was ever mentioned for the EU presidency.

Wise EU heads always said that the presidency would be defined by the first person who held the job.  Well, now we know.  Intelligent, civilised, modest, with a calming sense of humour – a consensus-builder and an organiser.  Good qualities.  But has the EU been ambitious enough?