Brussels diary

Brussels diary
October 19, 1995

"Never read an official document" was the advice offered to Jacques Santer on his unexpected departure to Brussels as president of the European Commission. The paperwork tip came from Nicholas Elam, Britain's ambassador in Luxembourg-not exactly a Foreign Office hardship post. Six months on, "Champagne Jacques" shows few signs of breaking the habits of a lifetime.

Stories abound of him nodding off in meetings, or drifting hopelessly as his colleagues navigate their way around Spanish fishing rights off Morocco and rum quotas in the Caribbean. General verdict: nice guy, just not up to the job.

Santer's trade-mark is an inane grin and a commendable deference to everyone down to the station-master at Luxembourg's Gare Centrale. But he's a much shrewder operator than most people think. He has made a career out of people underestimating him.

In 1985, as Luxembourg's prime minister, he persuaded Margaret Thatcher to agree to more majority voting in return for the free movement of capital in Europe. The compromise launched the 1992 single European market-and placed a time bomb under the Tory party. Mrs T failed to grasp how much she had given away to the Euro-builders; she lamented as much in her memoirs. Santer, lest we forget, still has a job-and a future in public life.

He has powerful allies, too: chiefly among fellow Christian Democrats in Europe. Chancellor Helmut Kohl has been a pal for more than 20 years. It is still the case that not much is decided in Brussels before a protective call to Bonn-or Frankfurt.

Sometimes, the German route is unashamedly direct. Hans Tietmeyer, the towering head of the Bundesbank, is a fierce critic of the planned single currency. He loves using his physical presence and the Deutsche Mark's power to bludgeon opponents into submission. Santer ducked a confrontation and invited Tietmeyer to a two-and-a-half-hour lunch in Brussels, during which the Buba chief was given a blank cheque to edit the Commission draft on Emu. You can't build monetary union against the will of 80 million Germans, shrugs a Santer aide.

Much of the criticism of Santer is nostalgia-driven: false memories of a golden age when visions of a United States of Europe stood unchallenged. In the late 1980s, the high point of the Delors era, everything seemed possible: a single market, a single currency, even a common European army. Then the Wall came down, and the reality set in that Europe's borders could not stop at the Oder.

Now everyone, including Santer, is struggling to work out how to organise a Europe of as many as 25 states. Indeed this will be the big theme at next year's intergovernmental conference (IGC). Santer's five-year term will be measured not by how long he stays awake, but how he tackles enlargement, the IGC and Emu. If he scores two out of three, he'll be a hero.

What the Euro-federalists forget is that the Delors Commission was secretive, autocratic and reflexively pro-French. The Santer Commission is more open, more even-handed, and more democratic: almost all important issues go to the vote.

Sir Leon Brittan, Her Majesty's Government's senior Commissioner, is of the old school, and often finds himself in the minority. A Lithuanian by descent, he saw his destiny as the man who would unite east and western Europe. History beckoned, but Santer handed the plum central and eastern European portfolio to a lacklustre Dutchman, Hans van den Broek.

Now most people would have been happy with a job which covered trade and political relations with the US, Japan, China and the advanced Asian economies. But "Sirloin's" appetite for empire building is insatiable. His latest appendage is vice-president of the Commission, a largely ceremonial post. (Although Sir Leon was pretty determined to get it.)

After blustering about a resignation, Sir Leon sent Colin Budd, his Foreign Office front-man, to deliver an ultimatum to Santer. Sir Leon was not prepared to share his post. Besides, it was common knowledge inside the Commission that Sir Leon's rivals were either incorrigibly lazy (Martin Bangemann of Germany) or raving mad (Manuel Marin of Spain). Budd still cannot figure out why he was not thrown out of the presidential suite on the spot.

Santer's latest dilemma is what to do with Bernard Connolly, the faceless fonctionnaire whose Rotten Heart of Europe diatribe against monetary union has achieved cult status among Tory Euro-sceptics. Sacking Connolly would make him a martyr overnight. He might even go to the European Court of Justice. But sparing him would make Santer look like a wimp. Santer is adamant: no civil servant earning £70,000 a year can expect to accuse the commission of KGB tactics and get away with it.

So Bernard the bomb-thrower has self-detonated after nearly 20 years in Brussels. His consolation is a successful book, a stroll around the lecture circuit, and maybe even a guest appearance on the fringes of the Tory party conference.

And anyway, what are we going to call the single currency? One place you won't find the answer is in the Times which recently serialised Bernard Connolly's Rotten Heart of Europe. Connolly, hitherto a faceless fonctionnaire, argues that monetary union is a con-trick which will inevitably lead to a Franco-German war. The mad Mancunian may have made waves in Britain, but in Brussels his only claims to fame is a hushed-up memo which accused a German socialist colleague of Nazi propaganda in defending the ERM Connolly must now face the music: Beethoven's "Ode to Joy"?