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For a good chuckle, check out the Wikipedia entry of Hans-Gert Pöttering, the European Parliament’s president. Point No.3, headlined “Commission Speculation”, says there are rumours that Pöttering will be Germany’s next member of the European Commission, succeeding Günter Verheugen.

The entry states: “It is widely known that Angela Merkel wants to nominate a Christian Democrat as Commissioner designate for the next Commission mandate 2009-2014 and Pöttering is seen by many as a strong and properly qualificated contestant for the job.”

Hmm. Let’s have another look at that. “Properly qualificated”? If I were a betting man, I’d say that boo-boo represented a German-speaker’s attempt at translating “qualifiziert” (”qualified”). Which raises the fascinating question of who wrote or edited the Wikipedia entry.

Editing your Wikipedia profile, or the profile of your boss, your company, your friend or your political hero, is not unknown. Changes to Richard Nixon’s profile have been traced to the computers of CIA staff. Changes to entries about Roman Catholic saints have been traced to Vatican computers.

But the European Parliament, majestic and terrifying though it no doubt is, isn’t the CIA or the Vatican. And naturally, I have no idea who wrote or edited Pöttering’s Wikipedia profile.

But two things are clear. First, Pöttering will be out of his present job after the next European Parliament elections in June 2009. Second, no one close to Merkel seriously thinks she wants to make Pöttering Germany’s next EU commissioner.

All of which makes me wonder who is promoting Pöttering’s candidacy on the Wikipedia website. But the truth is I’m not properly qualificated to judge.

With the European Union’s Lisbon treaty in deep trouble, some of the finest minds in Brussels are at work devising solutions to problems of which the general European public is wholly unaware. For example, the size and composition of the European Commission.

If the Lisbon treaty doesn’t come into force next year, the next Commission will have to be selected according to rules set out in the EU’s 2003 treaty of Nice. These state that when the EU has grown to include 27 countries (which it now has), the number of commissioners should be “less than the number of member-states”.

But Nice does not say how EU governments are to achieve the reduction. In the light of Ireland’s No to Lisbon, this gives ample scope for political and bureaucratic deal-making over coming months.

Fear of losing their commissioner played a part in the Irish voters’ rejection of Lisbon, but few seemed to understand that Ireland would be worse off under Nice. Lisbon contained a provision stating that, if all member-states agreed, they could abandon the commitment to reducing the Commission’s size and keep one commissioner per member-state. Before the Irish vote, many in Brussels had quietly assumed this was exactly what would happen after Lisbon took effect. By contrast, Nice has no such provision.

So if the Nice treaty remains in force next year, what can be done? One member-state has already proposed an answer. Cut the Commission in size, as Nice stipulates, but only from 27 to 26 members. Let the country which loses its commissioner take the job of High Representative for foreign policy (at present, Javier Solana of Spain). Let him or her attend Commission meetings. Hey presto! Everyone’s still in the room.

You have to admit, it’s an ingenious proposal. In fact, it’s so ingenious that it almost makes you ask, “Why bother with Lisbon, after all?” Which, of course, cannot possibly have been the question at the back of the mind of the country which floated the proposal … the UK!  

According to participants at the EU’s post-Irish referendum summit in Brussels, the atmosphere among the 27 national leaders is not one of crisis or despair, but resignation and a sense of having been there and done all this before - i.e., after the French and Dutch threw out the old constitutional treaty in 2005.

However, it’s also clear there are more than a few mutual recriminations going on in the corridors of the Justus Lipsius building in Brussels. “It’s what I’d call the ‘day after effect’,” says one top-level EU official, referring to last week’s Irish rejection of the Lisbon treaty.

If Ireland is a problem, what does that make the Czech Republic? The Czechs have been resisting efforts to include a line in the final summit communiqué that would emphasise the EU’s efforts to go ahead with national ratifications of the treaty in spite of the Irish No. This is irritating some delegations, who think the Czechs are riding on the coat-tails of the Irish rather than doing the decent thing - or the courageous thing - and joining the rest of the EU in defending the Lisbon treaty.

The situation at present is that the Czech Senate (upper house of parliament) has sent the Lisbon treaty to the nation’s constitutional court for scrutiny. President Vaclav Klaus has declared the treaty dead - the only EU head of state to go so far. The Irish No, meanwhile, has emboldened critics of the treaty in the ruling Civic Democrat party, whose hold on power is not particularly strong. All of which makes Czech ratification of Lisbon far from a done deal.

Mirek Topolanek, the Czech prime minister, is giving private assurances that his government will ratify Lisbon. But when Czech officials appear in front of TV cameras at the summit, they are saying something subtly different. For example, Alexandr Vondra, the Czech minister for European affairs, says the Lisbon treaty is “in the parking lot” and a jolly good thing, too. ”Don’t press us. Any pressure could be counter-productive,” Vondra warns.

In the end, the Czechs may have to buckle. They are due to take over the EU’s rotating presidency next January, and it would create a disastrous impression if, when they move into the hot seat, they were seen as bad team players.

But if I were a betting man, I would not expect the Czechs to have ratified Lisbon by the EU’s next summit on October 15-16.

According to the memorable aphorism of Robert Kagan, the conservative US scholar, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus. But when President George W. Bush was in Europe last week and heard about Ireland’s rejection of the European Union’s Lisbon treaty in a referendum, it must have seemed to the outgoing president that Europeans are so incapable of getting their act together that they’re really from Pluto - which astronomers no longer classify as a planet.

The same thought may cross the mind of President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia when EU leaders arrive next week in the western Siberian city of Khanty-Mansiysk for an EU-Russia summit. Of course, it’s possible Medvedev will be rather more exercised about the revelation that the US has been thinking about putting part of its proposed missile defence system in Lithuania - which is precisely the sort of things that Martians, rather than Plutonians, do. 

Today the leaders of the EU’s 27 member-states are rolling into Brussels for a summit whose main theme, before the crisis erupted over the Lisbon treaty, was supposed to be a robust European response to soaring fuel and food prices. Of course, there isn’t much the EU can do on that front, either, because in the end it’s mostly a question of world demand and supply.

Still, I don’t buy the oft-heard argument that EU leaders are totally out of touch with public opinion. Take last Monday’s meeting of EU foreign ministers in Luxembourg. Much breast-beating went on there about whether the Irish referendum result showed that the EU was too technocratic and too elitist. According to two people who attended the discussions, one foreign minister - Radek Sikorski of Poland - even burst out: “Why don’t we write treaties that even we in this room can understand?”

A question to shake up any solar system!  

Its 3pm on a cloudy Dublin Friday, and, as the results of the Irish referendum come flooding in, it could hardly be more clear what a kick in the teeth - and possibly to another part of the political establishment’s anatomy -  the Irish electorate has delivered by rejecting the European Union’s Lisbon treaty.

Tipperary North: 50.2 per cent No to 49.8 per cent Yes, on a turn-out of 58.5 per cent… Tipperary South: 53.2 per cent No to 46.8 per cent Yes, on a turn-out of 55 per cent… Waterford: 54.3 per cent No to 45.6 per cent Yes, on a turn-out of 53 per cent…Limerick East: 53.9 per cent No to 46.1 per cent Yes on a turn-out of 51 per cent.

The Limerick East result was especially significant, because its voting patterns often reflect trends at a national level.

And of course, the No campaigners are ecstatic. But they are not depicting their victory as a defeat for the EU - far from it. “this is not a eurosceptic message at all, ” Declan Ganley, the self made businessman and promient No campaigner, told Irish radio. “We want to be at the heart of Europe, but it’s got to be accountable to the will of its citizens.”

Ganley reckons that Irish premier Brian Cowen can go to the EU summit of heads of state and government in Brussels next Thursday and Friday “and look for a better deal for the Irish people” than is contained in the Lisbon treaty.

But what exactly can Ireland ask for? For one thing, Ganley proposes that Ireland be allowed to keep its European commissioner - Lisbon foresees abolishing the automatic right of all 27 member-states to their own commissioner. For another, Ganley suggests changing the new weighted EU voting rules, based partly on the size of a country’s population, that are contained in Lisbon.

Eeek! The voting rules are impossible for average Europeans to understand, but some may recall that when the Polish government was complaining about them last year it marched into a summit battle under the slogan: “The square root or death!”

What will it be this time? “The distance formula in Cartesian co-ordinates, or we’re off”?

At 12 O’clock on Friday, after three hours of counting in the Irish referendum, it is starting to look as if Irish voters have rejected the European Union’s Lisbon treaty - and, to borrow a phrase from the late Saddam Hussein, touched off the mother of all political crises in Europe.

“We’re not calling it, but it looks like it’s going to be No,” one senior government official told the Financial Times.

“It looks like a majority have voted No,” confirmed Lucinda Creighton, director of the referendum campaign for Fine Gael, the main opposition party, which supports the Lisbon treaty.

And this is also pretty much the view of the reporters for the state broadcasting network RTE who have fanned out across Ireland and who are watching the local counts. They are saying that the No vote on Thursday was especially strong in urban working-class districts and in rural areas.

If it really is No, Ireland’s three main political parties - the ruling Fianna Fáil and the opposition Fine Gael and Labour - will have a lot to answer for. Despite agreeing on the need for a Yes vote, they often sniped among themselves about how effective each party’s pro Lisbon campaign was.

It did not help that Bertie Ahern, the former Fianna Fáil leader, was forced to resign last month because of the negative effect of continuing public inquires into his personal financial affairs. Brian Cowen took over as premier but it may have been too late to make a difference.

As for the rest of Europe, it looks as if even if Ireland has voted No, the French, Germans and everyone else will say; “The ratification of Lisbon must go ahead.”

The question that will really need looking at, though, will be: “Why does the EU find is so difficult to sell itself to the voters?”

Today’s referendum is for Irish voters and the question is about Europe. But one of the paradoxes of modern Ireland and the confident role it plays in European affairs is that America’s presence is felt - and celebrated - everywhere in the country. Take O’Dea’s Hotel, a family-run establishment is the town of Loughrea, County Galway.

As I walked into the lobby at 8 o’clock this morning , having spent three hours driving west from Dublin and talking to bleary-eyed voters in Loughrea as they emerged from their polling station, whose face should I spot beaming at me from a photo on the reception desk but that of Bill Clinton.

The ex-president was a frequent visitor to Ireland during this eight years in office, as was, according to local accounts - his daughter Chelsea. Both were made exceptionally welcome, as US presidents and their families always have been in Ireland.

But it so happens that some years ago Loughrea was designated Ireland’s “Eurotown”, in a project that saw several dozen local small businesses switch to the euro from the old Irish pound on an accelerated basis. Their experiences were then used to help small businesses elsewhere in Ireland get used to the single European currency.

There’s not a lot in Loughrea these days to remind you that it was once Eurotown. But in the surrounding countryside you see quite a a few No campaign posters, put up by those who want Ireland to reject the European Union’s Lisbon treaty.

Though I have nothing against Peter Mandelson, the EU trade commissioner, one of the most eye-catching No posters is the one that displays a huge pitchfork and the words : “Tell Mandelson where to stick it.”

Be that as it may, the fact is that American culture, American business practices, American investment and American people are a big part of what makes modern Ireland tick and feel proud of itself. The Irish have achieved the clever and admirable feat of making themselves liked in Europe without sacrificing their close connections with the US.

In some countries on the Continent, a European identity is treated as something that almost by definition must be in opposition to America. Not so in Ireland.

There is a lesson there for another island on the north-west coast of Europe, that’s for sure.

Perhaps it’s just bravado, or the effects of one extra Guinness for the road, but the Yes camp appears less nervous than you might think. On Tuesday night, only 36 hours before the polls open for Ireland’s referendum on the European Union’s Lisbon treaty, an adviser to an Irish government minister reviewed the state of the world from his seat in a Dublin bar and confided that he expected a 52 to 48 per cent victory for the pro-Lisbon forces.

This morning, I put his forecast to a prominent businessman in the Irish capital. “Oh really? I’d heard 53 to 47,” he replied.

Whether either of these predictions owes anything to the private polling that is being conducted around the Emerald Isle is not entirely clear. The No camp, for its part, has a point when it says the most recent published polls show the anti-Lisbon vote steadily going up. “We’re not taking a single vote for granted,” says Declan Ganley, the leader of the anti-Lisbon Libertas movement.

 By common consent, a great deal depends on the turn-out. It was the low turn-out of about 35 per cent that caused the upset No vote in Ireland’s referendum on the EU’s Nice treaty in June 2001. When the Irish voted again on the treaty in October 2002, the turn-out was 49 per cent and the result was a convincing Yes victory.

On Thursday, experts say that a turn-out of 45 per cent or more of Ireland’s 3.05m voters should be sufficient for the Lisbon treaty to squeeze through.

 But it may not be quite so simple. According to an Irish Times poll published on June 6, 70 per cent of respondents said they were very likely to vote in the referendum. Even if such a high turn-out is improbable, some analysts say that much  “soft opinion” - people who are not especially pro -or anti-European and who may not even have decided whether to bother to vote on Thursday - is trending in a No direction.

If this is so, a high turn-out - say, between 60 and 70 per cent - may not work to the advantage of the Yes forces. “As things stand, we may very well see a situation where a very low turn-out favours the No side,  a medium turn-out favours the Yes side, and a very large turn-out might just favour the No side,” writes Harry McGee of the Irish Times political staff.

A dozen campaign volunteers standing around a large white truck, a dozen reporters with microphones and notebooks, and a handful of pedestrians trying to squeeze past on the pavement: this wasn’t exactly the largest crowd at a political event in Dublin’s history.

But if Declan Ganley, the self-made businessman who is one of the loudest voices calling on Irish voters to reject the European Union’s Lisbon treaty in Thursday’s referendum, was disappointed by the low turn-out, he was giving nothing away. 

It was a beautiful sunny afternoon in the Irish capital, and Ganley had summoned the media to admire his final campaign poster, about to be plastered in various public places around the city. Next to a picture of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, the poster proclaims: “Good for him, bad for us. Vote No to Lisbon.”

France seems to be playing an unusually large role in Ireland’s referendum. It was only on Monday that French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner suggested that the rest of Europe would view the Irish as selfish ingrates if they voted No in spite of having received billions of euros in EU funds over the last 35 years.

For some of the Irish reporters milling near Ganley’s truck, however, the focus of interest wasn’t France or the new poster but how Ganley has been financing his campaign. The questioning was pretty aggressive, but it looked to me as if Ganley held his nerve.

On the other hand, a stunt he tried to pull off on Monday didn’t go quite according to plan. Having said the leaders of Ireland’s three main political parties should all go to Brussels on Friday to renegotiate the EU treaty if it is defeated the day before, Ganley announced he had bought Aer Lingus plane tickets in advance for each of them.

Unfortunately, the ticket purchased for Irish premier Brian Cowen spelled the passenger’s name “Brian Cowan”.

China’s hunger for African raw materials is well-known. Less well-known, but utterly fascinating, are the stratagems which China uses to satisfy its hunger.

A few months ago, some officials from Beijing were being shown around Belgium’s Royal Museum for Central Africa, which is located in Tervuren on the outskirts of Brussels. Known for short as the Africa Museum, this is one of the world’s great anthropological, zoological and geological institutes, with wonderful collections of ethnographic objects, insects and tropical wood as well as an active scientific research centre.

The Africa Museum houses the archives of Sir Henry Morton Stanley, the Victorian explorer who played a part in the annexation of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) by King Leopold II of Belgium. In addition, the museum has all sorts of detailed maps and geological data about central Africa in its possession.

Given the DRC’s large reserves of diamonds, gold, copper, cobalt, coltan (used in mobile phones and laptop computers), zinc and manganese, this makes the museum a place of more than passing interest to mining executives, financial investors - and guests from booming economies in Asia.  

So after a routine tour of the stuffed animals, the Chinese visitors suggested to the museum staff that it would be a honour, a privilege, an unforgettable gesture of friendship, if they could be allowed to take a quick look at the maps and other specialised documentation not generally on public view. Of course, of course, came the reply. Why ever not?

So in they trooped into the vaults. Then the Chinese put in another request. Sorry to be a nuisance and all that, but would it be possible to take some copies of these materials?

What happened next is difficult to pin down. According to one version of events, the offer of a €20 banknote was enough for the Chinese to get their way. If so, it was - from a Chinese point of view - a brilliant and almost unbelievably, ridiculously cheap coup.

No need to send out geologists and surveyors to central Africa - it’s all been done for you a century ago! And no need to dip too deeply into China’s $1,682bn foreign exchange reserves! Inflation may be preying on everyone’s minds these days but, hey, €20 can get you a long way.