Who will speak for Prodi?
Now that Romano Prodi has picked Ireland's clever David O'Sullivan to be his chef de cabinet, the Brits may have to be content with the increasingly important job of commission spokesman. This is a post to which Prodi attaches huge weight following the disaster of Martine "Third Reich" Reicherts under Jacques Santer. No formal approach has yet been made, but informed Italians say that Prodi wants his old chum John Wyles, ex-Financial Times man in Rome.
Prodi was thought to be joined at the hip to La Stampa columnist Franco Levi, his biographer and prime ministerial spokesman. But maybe they are keeping it in the family. When Levi founded L'Indipendente newspaper in 1991, for which Prodi wrote and gave staunch moral support, John Wyles became its deputy editor.
Now based in Brussels and running a consultancy which helped manage the commission's successful launch of the euro, Wyles fits the bill as a veteran and respected hack, full of ideas on how the commission should present itself, and an Italian-speaker who is close to Prodi. Indeed, he has been giving Prodi discreet advice in recent weeks. Oddly enough, ten years ago Wyles was sounded out by Jacques Delors's cabinet to do the same job, but Delors finally decided that he disliked the Tory government too much to hire a Brit. Wyles is telling friends that if asked, he may find it hard to refuse, because Prodi's tenure could be a make-or-break time for the whole European project. (One unhappy precedent-L'Indipendente went bust after two years.)
Here comes trouble
If Wyles gets the job, one of his first problems will be Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the incoming Daily Telegraph correspondent who never quite fulfilled his life's dream of hounding Bill Clinton from office while he was the Sunday Telegraph man in Washington. But not for want of trying. The absurdly paranoid Ambrose, who used to stay at a different motel each night (always paying cash) during his Clinton-mafia hunts in darkest Arkansas, became a hero of the wilder shores of the American right, for his conspiracy theories. He has now turned his sights on Prodi. His campaign began with a full-page rewrite of old Italian press stories about Prodi's conflicts of interest dating from the days when he ran Italy's IRI state holding company. The Ambrose and Romano show will run and run.
Working for Joschka
Why is Gunther Verheugen, Germany's minister for Europe, lobbying so hard to become Monsieur PESC, in charge of Europe's vaunted new common foreign and security policy? Because he can't stand working for "that prima donna with a conscience," Joschka Fischer, that's why.
Latest on Patten and Kinnock
Talking of Euro-jobs, another vacancy looms which looks tailor-made for Chris Patten, once the bombing ends. How does Viceroy of Kosovo sound? Somebody has to run the Nato-EU protectorate, and Patten knows a bit about being a governor-general. But his admirers have not entirely given up hope that Tony Blair might nominate Patten as Leon Brittan's successor at the commission. This would infuriate Neil Kinnock by giving him a heavyweight rival, and disappoint Alastair Goodlad, Blair's old "pair" at the House of Commons, who is William Hague's nominee. But if Blair can persuade Prodi to guarantee Kinnock the vice-presidency in charge of the EU's giant foreign affairs portfolio (currently spread among five commissioners), it just might work. The trouble is that Prodi is being told in Paris, Bonn and Brussels that his old chum Kinnock may be a grand chap at a party, but might not be up to the job.
Don't drop the Finn
Prodi's most important appointment will be the commissioner he picks to run the administration who must persuade or bully the staff unions to swallow the sweeping reforms which the heads of government say they want. Finland's Erkki Liikanen tried to do it last year, but had the rug pulled from under him by a timid Jacques Santer after a one-day strike. Liikanen, who expects to be re-nominated, is tough enough to bring it off. But in parliament's current mood, MEPs seem determined to claim at least one scalp from the old members of the discredited Santer team when parliament holds its confirmation hearings for the new commissioners in September. Liikanen, as the former Budget commissioner, is their prime target.
The Kaiser speaks out
MEPs have yet to learn about an off-the-record briefing given to German hacks by Dietrich von Kyaw, the honorary Kaiser of Brussels on his second tour as Bonn's permanent representative. Unhappy at the way German MEPs led the fight to ditch the Santer commission, von Kyaw complained that "they just wanted to get on television." Then he blamed them for leaving Europe rudderless as the latest Balkan war broke out: "You just have to look at the situation in Kosovo, to realise that this disaster can be weighed in human lives." The German hacks were so outraged that they debated going public with his remarks-loudly enough to be overheard.
Trojan fall
A spectre is haunting the Eurocrats; it goes by the name of Sages-2. This is the second report of the Comit? des Sages, the group of Wise Persons who delivered that devastating report on fraud and mismanagement on 15th March which sank the Santer commission. They are now writing a second report on the bureaucracy-and the smart money says that the fall guy will be commission secretary-general Carlo Trojan.
