Can Jacques Chirac have been serious? Does Eddie George know how close he came? Impeccable No. 10 sources say that during the marathon 11-hour lunch when Europe's leaders hammered out their controversial deal on the new central bank, the French president suddenly came up with an innovative solution. If Tony Blair would announce that Britain would join the euro-zone forthwith, then Chirac would drop his demand for Jean-Claude Trichet to run the bank, and approve a British president to run the ECB for a full eight-year term. Helmut Kohl didn't even have time to blink, nor Holland's Wim Kok to object to this last-ditch French attempt to block Wim Duisenberg before Blair flashed "a cold, quick smile" and moved on. Ah, the might-have-beens of history.
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now that duisenberg has got the job, at least temporarily, the biggest casualty of Europe's longest lunch appears to be the Europe edition of the Wall Street Journal. The staff worked until 3am Sunday morning putting out their step-by-step story of what went wrong, who did what to whom and what the deal meant. But then somebody in production pressed the wrong button. And the Journal's lead story suddenly turned into something else altogether. These things happen. Pity that the disaster was compounded by another hiccup which meant that the only subscribers who did not get Monday morning's carefully prepared supplement on the euro were in-you guessed it-Brussels.
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former commission president Jacques Delors has joined the two-speed club. From his new base at the "Notre Europe" think-tank, Delors has been pumping out interviews, articles and essays which spell out his strategy for a two-tier Europe. It is based on a federal core of the six original members, and possibly including the other members of the euro-zone, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Finland and Austria. Delors sees the rest as "a wider Europe, whose members would benefit from the advantages of the single market."
In an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, Delors spelled out what this federal project would mean for its members: "I am even proposing writing into the treaty the areas that would be specifically reserved to the nations, notably education, social security, employment, culture and regional planning." National governments would, in other words, become swollen parish councils.
Then, in an interview with Belgium's Le Soir, Delors described his plan for "personalising" next year's European parliament elections. The various political groups in parliament should campaign around "a figure who would be appointed as the future president of the European commission and put to a popular vote. Once chosen by voters, this candidate could hardly be rejected by governments and would play the role of the almost mythical Mr Europe." No prizes for guessing who he has in mind.
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karel van miert, the competition commissioner who tamed Boeing, is having more trouble with Cr?dit Lyonnais. He invited French journalists to an off-the-record lunch to insist that he was going to hang tough, even if that meant France's biggest bank going belly up. The hacks dashed off to write their "Bankruptcy looms" stories, and French depositors started shifting their accounts elsewhere. Paris hit the roof, and rang commission president Jacques Santer. He smoothed the ruffled French feathers; then, during a characteristically smug statement on the launch of the euro, broke off to say that he was now personally involved in the Cr?dit Lyonnais matter, and a compromise was to be expected. An interesting precedent.
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belgium has just introduced the shortest-lived banknote in history. The 500 franc bill, worth eight quid, celebrates Ren? Magritte. Fittingly it features his most prophetic image of a Brussels sky that rains bureaucrats in their bowler hats and neat black coats. But thanks to those bureaucrats Magritte's shelf life runs out in 2002.
