Poland could be about to make life much harder for Angela Merkel, German chancellor, as she tries to give the kiss of life to the EU’s comatose constitutional treaty. Warsaw is threatening to reopen one of the treaty’s most contentious issues: how much power each country should have in the Council of Ministers, the Union’s main legislative body.

"The proposed voting system in the EU constitution mostly hits Poland, according to mathematicians," said Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Poland’s prime minister last week. I don’t know which mathematicians he’s been speaking to, but he’s plain wrong.

The real maths behind the argument are fascinating, because they underscore a traditional Polish suspicion of their western neighbours - a factor which could make a Poland-Germany summit this week on the Baltic coast especially tricky.

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David Cameron’s new Movement for European Reform is a strange thing. Launched by the British Conservative leader on Tuesday in Brussels, there were several things which struck me as slightly unusual about the inauguration of this new centre-right group.

The first was the fact that the Conservatives had gone to the trouble to bring along about 90 students from London schools to "see at first hand" Europe’s future being discussed: they also performed the useful role of filling empty seats at the back of the hall and looking youthful.

The second is the fact that the Movement for European Reform - which is intended to pave the way in 2009 to the creation of a new political group in the European parliament - does not actually really exist.

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There was a time when the spring European Council was dedicated to questions of economic reform - the annual paying of homage to the Lisbon agenda, and its vainglorious targets for making the EU the top performing economic bloc in the world.

Not any more. This year’s summit on March 8-9 will see Europe’s leaders focussing instead on energy policy and - most important of all - climate change. I doubt if their discussions on the Lisbon agenda will last more than ten minutes, if that.

I just wonder whether we are in a classic "top of the cycle" moment, when Europe lulls itself into the dangerous view that the reforms are paying off because the economy is working well.

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Great to have some feedback on my recent comment about Britain’s attitude towards Europe post-Blair. But some people in Brussels would chuckle at the idea I’m some kind of self-loathing federalist Brit - a species which admittedly can be found in this habitat.

My point is not that Britain should sign up to a federalist agenda (indeed there aren’t many countries left that are still pushing it, apart from Belgium), but rather that there exists a great opportunity for Gordon Brown or David Cameron to shape the EU in a way that helps the UK.

As a French MEP told me the other day: "The Brits are winning in Europe. So what is their problem?" Indeed one of the reasons cited by French politicians for the No vote to the constitution is that it was too Anglo-Saxon.

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Tony Blair is not the most loved politician in Europe: too pro-American, too liberal, too British and so on. But what many European politicians seem to have missed is that Blair is the most pro-European British prime minister since Edward Heath in the 1970s: things aren’t going to get any better.

Gordon Brown, Blair’s presumed successor, has a reputation around Europe for being uninterested in the EU and dismissive in his dealings with fellow ministers. But what would happen if Brown lost the next British election - probably in 2008 or 2009 - to the Conservatives?

A glimpse of Britain’s European future came on Wednesday in a wide-ranging speech by William Hague, the Conservative foreign policy spokesman. If you thought Tory thinking had moved on much since the days of Margaret Thatcher, this might make you think again.

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A rare sighting of Gordon Brown in Brussels on Tuesday, which dutifully followed his usual routine for Ecofin councils. Namely the British press in London is briefed in advance on the lecture he intends to deliver to fellow finance ministers - this time on the failings of the EU’s single market.

Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer then turns up at the meeting and delivers the message that other finance ministers have already read about in the morning papers. Then he flies home again. Job done.

"He’s right of course," says one Ecofin participant. "His observations on the single market and what needs to be done are valid, but the way he does it is counter-productive. He comes across as arrogant, he doesn’t get involved in networking."

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I’ll be in Madrid on Friday, listening to the representatives of 20 countries protesting their love for the European Union constitution (deceased), and insisting that as much of the hallowed treaty should be saved as possible.

That is their right and they have a point. After all, 18 out of 27 member states have ratified the constitution (that’s the equivalent of 270m people) and Portugal and Ireland will also be in Madrid as non-ratifying but honorary "friends of the constitution".

But they should prepare to be disappointed. The fact is that if anything is going to be saved it will have to be modest, unthreatening and boiled down to its barest essentials. This is how you do it:

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Has the president of the European Central Bank finally given ground in the long-running "battle of the Jean-Claudes"? After months of refusing to discuss holding more meetings with Jean-Claude Juncker, the political head of the eurozone, ECB chief Jean-Claude Trichet, now seems ready to talk.

Mr Trichet famously refused to reply to a letter from Mr Juncker last year, after the Luxembourg prime minister suggested they should have regular informal chats - possibly over breakfast. The ECB president reckoned his public acceptance of this invitation to coffee and croissants could be seen as giving in to political pressure.

But earlier this month the two did get together for an informal 45-minute chinwag in Frankfurt, along with Joaquin Almunia, the EU monetary affairs commissioner. More such encounters could follow. So has Mr Trichet sold part of the bank’s independence, as some of the sobre suited boys at Germany’s Bundesbank seem to believe?

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It may seem like clever domestic politics, but Ségolène Royal’s plan to re-run France’s referendum on the EU constitution looks like a disaster waiting to happen: both for France and Europe.

Ms Royal will win plaudits for her commitment to giving the French people their democratic voice, should she win the French presidential elections this spring. Nicolas Sarkozy, her rival, has already committed himself to trying to negotiate a "mini" version of the constitution and to ram it through the national assembly.

Scoring points off the "undemocratic" Mr Sarkozy is the easy bit. The tough part comes if Ms Royal wins the election and has to see through her promise.

By announcing a poll in France in 2009, she is increasing the likelihood that the EU will never have a new institutional settlement. If France has a referendum then the pressure will be on others - like the UK, Netherlands and Poland - to follow suit.

A No vote is certain somewhere along the line, leaving Europe in a state of turmoil, possibly leading to a split and the development of a "core" group of countries committed to more integration. Although some in Paris, Brussels and Berlin like the idea, most agree it would be better for the Union to stick together if possible.

But what about if the country voting No is France - by no means an unlikely outcome given that French voters rejected the constitution in 2005 and only approved the Maastricht Treaty by the tiniest of margins in 1992?

Ms Royal thinks voters can be won over if the treaty is made more "French": perhaps by adding a protocol enshrining social rights or some new clause to make the European Central Bank less interested in inflation and more interested in economic growth.

Dream on. The British will never accept the first idea and the Germans are highly unlikely to approve any changes to the ECB’s statutes, particularly if they are aimed at loosening the bank’s grip on inflation. Disappointed French voters may then be even more likely to vote No to the Mark II treaty than to the first.

Ms Royal’s plans may win her some votes this spring and make her look like a good democrat, but they could put in jeopardy the reforms Europe needs and France’s own position in the EU.

Visiting Berlin last week, the front page headline in Bild Zeitung transported me back to Britain 15 or even 20 years ago. "Crazy salaries," shouted the story from the newsstands, complaining about how Brussels officials earn so much more than their Berlin counterparts and listing their allegedly lavish perks.

It could have been The Sun, during the good old days. The fact is that the British tabloid has concluded that Europe is boring and frankly a lot less threatening that it used to be. The paper hardly ever puts the issue on the front page. So what’s up with the Germans?

The fact is that British euroscepticsm, while undoubtedly rooted in the country’s geography and history, was fanned by a feeling that the British system was under threat. During the 1980s and 1990s there was a sense in the right-leaning media that Brussels was trying to kill the Thatcherite revolution with ideas of "social Europe" and suffocating red tape.

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