Brussels diary

Who's paranoid about Europe now?
June 19, 2000

Rearranging the deckchairs

How do you publicly dump your closest political consort while privately retaining him? Answer? You dilute the negative publicity by creating a bigger hubbub elsewhere. That is the current explanation for the EU's "Morning of the Short Breakfasts," when President Prodi moved to shake up his administration by rearranging the deckchairs.

The personnel changes in Brussels last month indicated more about the relative weakness of the president than who is in or out of his favour. As you read first here, Carlo Trojan, the rubicund-faced Dutch secretary-general of the commission-its chief civil servant-was riding for a fall after responsibility for the collapse of the Santer commission was widely laid at his door. But Trojan's surprising survival into the Prodi presidency meant that many thought he was now safe.

Alas, poor Carlo had not calculated for the "problem" of Ricardo Levi, Prodi's press spokesman and the messenger blamed by other commissioners for their institution's poor image. After the unprecedented attacks on Prodi from the German press, his colleagues had made clear that his old chum had to go.

To engineer a dignified exit for Levi, il presidente decided to replace Trojan with David O'Sullivan, his Irish chef de cabinet, and promote Michel Petite, the Frenchman in his cabinet, to the top job-thus mollifying Parisian whinges about an Anglo-Italian cosa nostra. In addition, he donated the fallen favourite an intellectual plaything-his personal think-tank, the Cellules des Prospectives.

Founded during the Jenkins presidency as a modest speech-writing cell, this autonomous fiefdom took on new gravitas when Jacques Delors turned it into what is called in English The Forward Studies Unit, aimed at planning life after the single market of 1992.

In its latest evolution, Levi's new body will be grandly rechristened the Economic and Political Council, which sounds suspiciously like another inner cabinet. More important to Prodi, perhaps, is the location of Levi's office. It is his old one on the 12th floor of the Breydel building, directly opposite the president. "Levi, like his boss, is going nowhere," said a commission cynic, "and I mean that in all senses of the word."

The cabinet question

Hardly surprising, then, that the cabinet system itself, which surrounds commissioners with an inner coterie of handpicked political appointees, is coming under critical scrutiny (see also Chris Patten p48). The purpose of the cabinet is to protect its boss's back, spy on other commissioners, filter his information flow, censor appointments, control the diary, issue strategic media leaks, fix problems and check that the humble foot-soldiers, the civil servants, are doing what they claim to be. And, of course, to advance its members' own careers.

In Britain, a very senior secretary of state might fight for two political advisors-usually former party researchers in shiny suits, haughtily looked down on by the Sir Humphreys. By comparison with Brussels, where cabinets have just been reduced from eight to six members, the British aide is a political dwarf. Until Prodi, commissioners lived with their cabinets in the Parnassian tower of the Breydel building while civil servants were housed elsewhere. A chef de cabinet still holds the same service grade (A1) as a director-general (the equivalent of a permanent secretary) and often treats the DG as a tiresome annoyance. Pascal Lamy, the current French trade commissioner, made his name as Jacques Delors's chef and all-round Svengali, and secured his reputation as the fearsome puppet master of les amis de Jacques. Among his junior cabinet colleagues-one Michel Petite.

Anglo-Saxon takeover continues

Promotion of Jonathan Faull to head the commission's press operation is yet more evidence of the Anglo-Italian conspiracy, according to the French press. Indeed, Le Monde has now joined the paranoia with its splendid four-page analysis of the near military efficiency of the British entryist war effort.

The report even quoted a senior and experienced Brussels diplomat describing how British commission members meet regularly under the instructions of Stephen Wall, HM Ambassador, to plot their next fiendish moves. These ravings (with suitably altered nationalities) is what you expect of the Daily Mail or the Daily Telegraph, yet they are now appearing in such august and respectable papers as Lib?ration and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. That suggests that there may be something in them.

Ironically, the British press is rather bemused by their colleagues' adoption of their own paranoid school of reporting, and resentful that, as the subject is Britain, they cannot follow.

The terrible fact is that, day by the day, Europe is becoming what Britain always wanted it to be: a free-trade zone with no particular political or ideological direction, firmly under the control of the member states through the Council of Ministers.

For new British correspondents such as Ambrose Evans-Pritchard-the persecutor of Bill Clinton-keeping the Telegraph foreign desk supplied with horror stories is proving tricky. "They want it reported like a sport, but it's more complicated than that," he has been heard to complain.

The element in the recent Le Monde coverage which provoked the most glee in the British press corps was a report that Neil Kinnock now secretly rules Europe. Informed sources, as we reporters like to dub them, counterclaim that Kinnock's frustration with his brief to manage the commission has driven him to anti-depressants. n