Commission insiders are preening themselves that they have broken the code of New Labour-and found it just like the old one. They are particularly amused by what they regard as Labour's innocence in the ways of Brussels. When David Williamson retired from the key job of secretary-general of the commission, Britain demanded-and got-two director-general (DG) jobs in compensation. Against the advice of their Brussels hands, Robin Cook and Doug Henderson, his minister for Europe, decided to pick the two do-gooding departments of environment and development. They could have fought, as other nations do and as wily old Leon Brittan urged, for a heavyweight DG spot such as trade or competition. Not that London can really complain; with John Mogg as DG on the internal market, and Nigel Wickes chairing the monetary committee, Britain is hardly under-represented.
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this may be a bit of waste of DG Jim Currie, who was transferred from internal taxation and customs to the environment portfolio. The steely-haired Scot, who almost became a Jesuit, must now exercise all his diplomatic skill to get along with his Danish commissioner, Ritt Bjerregaard. Known as the Ice Maiden, and said to be a herring short of a sm?rg?sbord ever since she had to be talked out of publishing her Brussels diaries, she gets through staff at a voracious rate.
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talking of sir leon, the man who single-handedly forced the French and German languages to devise their own versions of "too clever by half," speculation has turned to his likely successor. Mostly this focuses on Chris Patten and Kenneth Clarke. Strong men in the finance ministers' committee wept when they heard the latter had been reduced to staying in a ?20-a-night B&B at the Tory conference in Blackpool. He would find Euro-expenses rather more lavish.
Appointing a Euro-commissioner is one of the sweeter bits of prime ministerial patronage. Ever since John Major gave Neil Kinnock such a rough ride to Brussels, Labour can claim that the leader of the opposition has no clear right to nominate his own choice. So first hints are being heard that Blair might not send a Tory to replace Sir Leon, but step up his wooing of the Lib-Dems by sending one of their indubitably Europhile worthies. The name of David Steel has been mentioned, if only because sending the other obvious candidate would be seen as a Blairite act of war. Even David Owen's few remaining admirers in Europe think of him as Lord Owen of former Herzegovina.
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labour meps are unlikely long to retain their proud status as the biggest caucus of any national party in the European parliament, boasting 62 of 84 Euro seats in England, Scotland and Wales. (They prefer to pass over Northern Ireland.) The brave experiment with PR at the next European election means that their ranks will inevitably be thinned, even if the Labour government's approval ratings continue at current levels. Although calculating the PR effect will be complex, it does not take a maths wizard to see that nice David Thomas, a former policeman and member of Greenpeace, will have a job holding on to the Suffolk and Norfolk South West seat he took in the 1994 tidal wave. In fact, given anything like the usual mid-term anti-government swing, Labour will take serious casualties. So why are some of them, the very bright new boy Mark Hendrick of Lancashire Central for example, thinking aloud about combining the European parliament elections with the promised referendum on Emu? The analysis goes like this: with the government, the TUC and CBI and the City all campaigning hard for a yes vote on Emu, Labour's endangered MEPs could save their skins on referendum coat-tails.
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the world's worst police force is to be reorganised, or so Prime Minister Jean-Luc Dehaene is proposing. Belgium's 2,000-strong Police Judiciaire, who like to think of themselves as Hercule Poirot's heirs, are being merged into the heavy mob of the 16,000-strong gendarmerie. The problem is that these two forces hate each other and failed to crack the notorious paedophile case because they kept feeding each other false leads. The Belgian fuzz is notorious for not catching its man, whether it be the Brabant killers who gunned down 28 people in their supermarket holdups of the 1980s, or the assassin of Deputy Prime Minister Andr? Cools in 1991. The original proposal of a commission of inquiry was to have a single national force. But the locally run communal police are to stay outside the mix. Seeing the proposal for a single national force as a power grab by the Flemish reds, the other parties, French and Flemish-speaking, made common cause to stop it, and keep the 589 separate commune forces in the name of-community policing.
