It's time HMG owned up. The man supposed to make monetary union work is neither French nor German. He is English, and his name is Sir Nigel Wicks.
Wicks chairs the EU's monetary committee, a secretive panel of central bankers and national treasury officials which jets into Brussels once a month. Their job is to make Emu fly, and few are pushing harder than our Sir Nigel, a former private secretary to Margaret Thatcher.
Since he took over from Jean-Claude Trichet, the intellectual fop who runs the Bank of France, Wicks has steered work on all the big Emu issues such as the German-backed budget stability pact and the reformed exchange rate mechanism.
Ruair?- Quinn, the brawny Irish finance minister who is chairing the Emu negotiations, thinks that Sir Nigel is indispensable. He coined the phrase "Wicks' Box" to describe compromises in the stability pact row with Bonn (causing giggles among the Germans as "Wichser" is German for wanker).
Back in London, the word is that Wicks is a turncoat. All those dinners with Ken Clarke in Brussels restaurants. Or maybe it's simply post-ERM fatigue. After all, Wicks was one of the chief defenders of sterling's participation in the Eurocurrency grid. The pound's forced exit in September 1992 was the greatest disappointment of his career-apart from losing out to Terry Burns in the race to become Treasury permanent secretary.
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Sir Nigel's influence in the Emu negotiations underlines the power of the permanent bureaucracy in Brussels. He belongs to the elite group of civil servants who keep the Euro-show on the road, fixing the deals which guarantee that summits such as the last gathering in Dublin appear to be a success.
Another British agent of influence is David Williamson, the top civil servant at the European commission. He has spent ten years as secretary general, first under the boot of Jacques Delors and latterly in step with Jacques Santer.
Williamson has flourished in the relaxed Santer regime, but he is ready to call it quits next year, shortly after his 63rd birthday. The news has panicked the British Foreign Office which knows there is no quality British candidate to replace him.
Jim Currie, the Scot who managed Sir Leon Brittan's first cabinet, has the brawn but not the brains. Besides, he has just been promoted to director general for VAT. Adrian Fortescue, another DG, is stuck with justice and immigration. Brian Crowe is still trying to work out if he really does have a job over at the council secretariat running the invisible EU common foreign and security policy. So, frantic pleas in London to Williamson to stay on a little longer. And a frantic scramble in Brussels to fill the slot.
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the front-runner is Carlo Trojan, Williamson's deputy. He is half Dutch, half Italian, and a specialist at summit horsetrading. Most Eurocrats would die for a name like Carlo Trojan because it guarantees the Dutch and Italian vote; and the Greeks, ever mindful of mythology, seem to like him too.
The obstacle to Trojan's promotion are the big countries, particularly France, which is fed up with all the small countries picking top jobs at the commission. Paris is still sore about Santer's appointment, the second Luxembourger to win the commission presidency in 15 years.
That is why the smart money for the sec-gen's job is on an insider from a big country. Enter Eneko Landaburu, a Basque who was educated in Paris, worked for Nestl?, and now runs an annual Ecus 25 billion-plus budget in the regional affairs directorate. A Delors favourite, he has the multicultural background necessary for the post.
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here's a lesson for the Brits. In Euro-life, the multilingual, multinational families move faster up the bureaucratic ladder. J?rgen Trump, the German secretary general of the European council secretariat, is married to a Greek. Jean-Claude Piris, the French head of the council legal services who is writing the Maastricht 2 Treaty, is married to an Icelander. Several of Helmut Kohl's European advisers are married to French women, including the formidable Joachim Bitterlich who is the single most important force in German foreign policy.
All these members of the Euro-bureaucracy would be happy to be called "collaborators." They know that the EU is a co-operative, collusive enterprise. The Brits, as David Williamson has lamented, have lost their sense of proportion.
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maybe that explains the latest rumour inside the commission that the British Eurocrats are plotting to form their own trade union. Their reasoning sounds logical: if John Major wins the next election, withdrawal from the EU is surely on the cards. It's time to stand up and be counted. And, hey, who wants to lose a lucrative Euro-pension?
