They are both running non-campaigns for two very different European Union jobs (that don’t even exist yet). But there’s a chance that Lord Patten’s bid to become Europe’s first foreign minister could scupper Tony Blair’s prospects of becoming EU president. Here is how.

Relations between Patten and Blair have never been good. Patten strongly opposed the invasion of Iraq, winning him a lot of friends in both European capitals and the EU parliament. Days before the outbreak of war, he gave a speech in Strasbourg warning that it’s “hard to build democracy at the barrel of a gun”, which had the MEPs swooning like teenage groupies. Read more