Here in the rotten heart of Europe a virulently Anglophobic French journalist has a confession to make. He is taking his first ever vacation in England this summer. Mais pourquoi? Eh bien, any country that's got room for 100-plus women in parliament and a declared gay in the cabinet, is surely worth a visit.
Over in the Spanish quarter, they are still celebrating Se?or Blair's election victory. They see it as a lifeline to Felipe Gonz?lez's Socialist party, still sinking under alle-gations of corruption. The landslide is also good news for German So-cial Democrats, Forza Italia, the Belgian liberals-in fact absolutely anyone who is ten votes short of a coalition.
Europe's political elite have discovered that Monsieur Blair is young, telegenic and stunningly undogmatic. He can talk about flexibility, innovation and the stakeholder society with a fluency which makes Chirac and Kohl sound like lumbering has-beens. And he comes from a big country. Who knows, says one Danish diplomat, maybe we've found someone who will stand up to Helmut?
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so brown, cook, henderson and Cunningham turn up in Europe and turn on the charm. Such niceties were seemingly beyond Hogg, Howard, Portillo and Rifkind. They were all too busy courting the sceps back home.
Eurocrats were so delighted at the Tory rout that they don't care that the new ministers are wobbly on their dossiers, can't find the right interpreters' channel, and are not sure when Sweden joined the EU. Right now, if you're British, all is forgiven.
For the new Labour government it gets serious when EU leaders gather at the special summit in Noordwyk aan Zee on 23rd May. The Dutch presidency was originally going to hold the meeting in Maastricht-a pay-off to catholic voters in the Limburg province, fed up with all the Euromeetings taking place in Amsterdam and the Hague.
The bribe looked like working-until President Chirac pointed out that, with French parliamentary elections due on 25th May, the last place he wanted to be was Maastricht, home of the treaty which limped through a referendum and whose name is forever associated in the mind of the ordinary French voter with deflation, unemployment and the preposterously overblown concept of European union.
The Noordwyk meeting was originally seen as a chance to soften up the Brits ahead of the mid-June summit in Amsterdam when EU leaders are pledged to produce yet another treaty, aka "Son of Maastricht." But with Blair being so reasonable, other countries are vying for the title of Europe's bad boy.
The front runners are the Swedes and their crusty IGC negotiator Gunnar Lund, a civil servant with Social Democrat connections. He knows how difficult the new Maastricht 2 treaty is going to be to sell to Swedish voters in a future referendum. So he's moved into the doghouse which was once the preserve of Stephen Wall, HMG's ambassador to the EU.
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new labour's new style required kicking Wall out of the negotiating chair in the IGC. Wall has spent nearly two years being John Major's "no" man in Brussels. No to more qualified majority voting. No to more powers for the European parliament. No to an ever closer union.
Wall, a buddy of Major's, leans to the Eurosceptical; but like all diplomats he hates saying no all the time. The beef war marked the point when he gave up on the Tory government. Poor old Stephen, says one of his colleagues, not cut out for the rough stuff.
Now Wall has got to show his new bosses in London that he can dance to a different tune-or face being eased out before the British presidency which begins on 1st January 1998.
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one other man who may also be packing his bags early is Leon Brittan-or so the Brussels rumour mill suggests.
One Eurocrat who knows him well says the senior British commissioner and chief EU trade negotiator is bored, frustrated and looking for a new challenge. He is ready to bet Leon will be out of Brussels by the end of the year.
Wait a minute. Brittan is certainly still mad at losing the plum enlargement portfolio to the unremarkable Hans van den Broek; and he still blames President Jacques Santer's chief of staff Jim Cloos. But does all this add up to a petulant exit from Brussels at the very moment when Britain's relations with Europe are about to get interesting, starting with the decision on whether to join a single currency?
The smart money is on Leon staying. He knows Tony Blair is too intelligent to use Neil Kinnock as his sole channel in Brussels. Our man still has a role to play, even if he's a Tory. Vive le Blairisme; but vive la diff?rence.
