Could Tony Blair’s shadow candidacy as the first full-time president of the European Union go the same way as Rudy Giuliani’s US presidential bid? Like Rudy, Tony has the name recognition factor and track record in government to be a frontrunner. He is also a figure bigger than his party, appealing across the divide. Blair himself is more popular in some EU countries than his own.

However, they share a chequered past. Giuliani was dogged by allegations from US firefighters that he cut and run on September 11 as mayor of New York. Blair is charged with invading Iraq on false pretences.

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Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, promised us a “new industrial revolution” last year and it looks as though he might just deliver.

Barroso seized on climate change as a new raison d’etre for the bloc on its 50^th birthday, now that war between its members was a distance memory. An economy built on fossil fuel would have to be weaned off it, he said.

No one really believed him, though the club’s 27 members were dragged far enough along, with differing levels of enthusiasm, to endorse fairly stiff targets for greenhouse gas reductions – a fifth below 1990 levels by 2020.

The potential gains are great, but the pain is also becoming clear, and as the Commission prepares to deliver its medicine on January 23 howls are growing louder around Europe.

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Trailing down to Strasbourg for the monthly meeting of the European parliament and Commission has its advantages. I am not referring to the non-stop Christmas drinks parties that spill into the lengthy corridors of the Tower of Babel, and carry on until the small hours in the bars of the agreeable French city..

Rather it is the occasional access to the power players that all have to make the same journey. On Tuesday I was just across the aisle from Jose Manuel Barroso, the Commission president, and Joao Vale de Almeida, his suave chief of staff, on the flight from Brussels.

Having mentally kicked myself for never taking up Portuguese as they chatted to each other I relied on sight alone to glean the workings of Barroso’s mind. He sat down with a vast stack of papers.

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The thaw between Poland and Brussels has sent a chill down spines in Lithuania.

Donald Tusk, the new Polish premier, arrived at the European Commission and parliament on Tuesday to show that his country was back in the centre of Europe. The era of the Kaczynskis, “the terrible twins”, picking fights with Brussels, was over.

The fear in Vilnius is that he may stop picking fights with Russia, too, leaving the Baltic republics, which only recently threw off the Soviet yoke, alone in the ring with the bear. Talks on resolving the Russian blockade of Polish meat, which in turn have held up a new EU-Russia partnership agreement to Brussels’ ill-concealed annoyance, start next week.

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Mariann Fischer Boel is pretty upset. The farming commissioner, not afraid of using agricultural language, saw Tuesday’s outline of a modernising "health check" overshadowed by a row other why money was going to golf courses and town councils.

The “stupid” observations, made in a report the week before by the Court of Auditors, the financial watchdog, and flamed up by the “sensational press”, were overblown, she told reporters. On Wednesday she had not calmed down much. She told the European parliament’s budgetary control committee: "It is not possible to receive an EU farm subsidy for a golf course. Only areas used for agricultural activity are eligible. Of course, it is possible that golf clubs, railway companies etc may also own adjoining or nearby land which is used for farming. On this land, the subsidies can of course be paid as long as the conditions are met."

The truth is, that now payment for production has been replaced with payment for landholding, farming can mean simply keeping it in a condition to be farmed.

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Can the common agricultural policy survive a dose of sunshine? Farm ministers on Monday agreed to publish for the first time details of the recipients of the 54 billion euro common agricultural policy. From 2008 anybody should be able to find out how much the farmer next door is getting from the taxpayer, which could undermine support for the 50-year-old policy.

The problem is that much of the cash goes not to John Barleycorn scraping a living from a few fields in Scotland, but to AN Agribusiness, hovering up subsidies as quickly and efficiently as a combine harvester. Names such as Nestle and Tate and Lyle are prominent.

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The case of the disappearing MEP may be the most baffling of all the mysteries contained in the new EU reform treaty. Others include the decision by 27 presumably busy leaders to fly to Lisbon to sign the wretched thing a day before they all meet in Brussels. Presumably this cost in time, taxpayer’s money and carbon emissions is the price to pay to thank the Portuguese for putting the “Lisbon treaty” to rest.

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Like many children of the 1960s, Jose Manuel Durao Barroso, the European Commission president, was a youthful communist. Now firmly on the centre-right, he explains his Maoism as a natural reaction to the autocratic regime running Portugal at the time. The young Barroso was a radical student leader during the Carnation Revolution of 1975 and some footage of those turbulent times has surfaced on YouTube recapturing those heady days. It’s certainly a far cry from pushing paper at the Berlaymont and may not be a time Barroso wants to remember. However, though the clip has disappeared from YouTube, he won’t be able to forget it. A Portuguese MEP has emailed it to the entire staff of the European parliament.

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Remember the battle of the square root, Poland’s chaotic manoeuvre at June’s summit in Brussels to win more voting rights? Warsaw wanted votes weighted according to the square root of population and at least fought back the advance of reform for a few years.

Now brace yourself for the citizens’ war, this time led by Italy. The early skirmishes are being fought in the European parliament but the front could yet move to Lisbon, complicating EU leaders’ hopes of finally laying the reform treaty to rest.

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One industry doing well out of Belgium’s political crisis is flagmaking. The red, yellow and black tricolour is sprouting from homes across Brussels as people express their support for the continuance of the multilingual state.

The movement has even crept into Dutch-speaking Flanders, where around 40 per cent of people want independence. A tipping point has been reached in my street on the edge of Brussels. On Sunday afternoon one of the 40 houses was flying the flag. By nighttime there were 11.

Mind you, my neighbours have a vested interest. At last count there was only one native Flemish speaker in the street, the rest Francophone or expats like myself. And they don’t want to find themselves suddenly foreigners.