The end of a British era looms in Brussels. Not the unlamented passing of the British presidency, but the departure of Sir Nigel Wicks from the monetary committee. What the British cabinet and Britain's Brussels diplomats could not achieve in blocking the emergence of the Euro-11 group to run the politics of the single currency, Wicks managed silkily to arrange. Thanks to his devious manoeuvrings on this secretive but powerful group, British officials will now help to prepare and staff Euro-11 meetings, and Gordon Brown will attend the September session where the Euro-11 decide their representation at the IMF and G7. Odd and sad, therefore, that Brown did not put himself out more to return the favour by getting Wicks the top job at the Treasury.
But then both No. 10 and No. 11 Downing Street are being less than fulsome about their civil servants in Brussels. There have been churlish mutterings that it may have been a mistake to keep the top man Steven Wall in the job after his debilitating bout with hepatitis. (Cook is blamed; not the foreign secretary, but the one who prepares the food.)
The usually poker-faced Wall got a touch of revenge when he let his jaw thud to the ground in public dismay at the last finance ministers' session in Luxembourg. Gordon Brown, supposedly above the partisan fray as representative of the presidency, had just broken every protocol rule by asserting that he would "stand up for British interests" against the euro-plot to destroy London's eurobond market with its new withholding tax. Monetary affairs commissioner Yves-Thibault de Silguy, a Breton baron who squirms at the way the elected Brown treats unelected commissioners like servants, grumbled to aides that he "had come to expect" that kind of b?tise from New Labour.
u u u
the austrians, who take over the presidency after the British, have learned a lesson from New Labour's inflated rhetoric, and have assiduously lowered expectations for their own term. So they should, grumble the Germans and Finns who will inherit the presidency. They fear that Austria's first stint in the chair is so under-staffed and sketchily prepared that they are already calling the December shindig in Vienna "the waltzing summit."
Who can blame the Austrians? Nothing will happen in the EU until the German elections are decided in September, and we find out whether we get a grand coalition, a Social Democrat coalition with the Greens, or even a pink-red coalition with the former communists, like the one just agreed in Saxony-Anhalt.
The most prominent Austrian in the EU, Agriculture commissioner Franz Fischler, knows that his own plans to tinker with the CAP are on hold until the Germans vote, and will probably stay that way until the Germans take over the presidency next January. By then the battle over Germany's budget rebate will be so heated that CAP reform could look like a tea party.
u u u
bruges is to be Europe's Cultural Capital in the year 2002, despite the publication of Roel Jacob's Bruges: the City behind the History, which reveals that the "mediaeval" city is a kind of Victorian Disneyland, carefully rebuilt over the last 100 years to look like the real thing. It is a safe bet that Bruges will not be importing a Scotsman to run it, after the fate of Robert Palmer in Brussels. The hero of Glasgow's year as Cultural Capital was brought in by Brussels with a ?90m budget to do the same for them. Now all his programme directors have been fired, and the president of the Bruxelles 2000 project, Bernard Foccroule, resigned with an open letter to the press.
u u u
at last, the long-awaited Franglais pun. Ever since the French ruled that non-governmental organisations should be called ONGs, pun-lovers have waited for two of them to take a just stand. Now the Eurogroup for Animal Welfare and our own RSPCA have challenged the World Trade Organisation's attack on animal protection laws. So finally we can record "Two ONGs do make a right."
