Want to give a Tory a bad time?: Here's how: help get one elected a Euro MP. What follows is desperation, humiliation and political schizophrenia. Bryan Appleyard reports from Brussels, where John Major has left them speechless

We are sitting in one of the strange coffee bars that punctuate the indecipherable corridors of the Euro-blocks in the centre of Brussels. A thin, bearded man approaches our table and asks, with an undisguised sneer: 'Isn't it time that you became a member of a decent pro-European party?'

Tom Spencer, Conservative Member of the European Parliament for Surrey West, winces and responds with a thin smile. 'Look what I get from Dutch liberals,' he mutters.

In another bar outside the parliamentary chamber, Elmar Brok, a stout German MEP, has gone nuclear. 'Come on] Come on]' he shouts across his beer at Paul Howell, Tory MEP for Norfolk, 'we know that the British only wanted enlargement to weaken the union. We know that. Why not get out of Europe? Nobody will stop you.'

He leans back, glances at me, and then leans forward again to deliver a diplomatic afterthought: 'I'm not anti-British. I'm an Anglophile.'

Back home, the Prime Minister appears to have been reborn as a Thatcherite nationalist, the Foreign Secretary performs fatigued pirouettes around arcane voting procedures and the tabloids wade in ancient European blood because Nazis might march through the streets of London.

But here in Brussels the long, indescribably complex task of building the union goes on. Here 32 poor, bloody foot soldiers - also known as Tory MEPs - race round the corridors, drink coffee and wonder what the hell they are supposed to do.

Sometimes cruelly known as the lost tribe of public schoolboys, they are an amiable, likeable, confused bunch who, with just over two months to go before the Euro-elections, are thinking about their futures. A brutal culling is inevitable. The best bet is that their numbers will be cut to 20, but some estimates go down to single figures. A certain black humour is abroad.

'What do you make,' I ask one, 'of Hurd's stand on the voting issue?'

'Off the record,' he replies, 'bloody incomprehensible.'

'On the record?'

'Incomprehensible.'

For 15 years a shifting band of Tory 'Euromps' has been suffering rising confusion. Getting off the plane in Brussels or Strasbourg, they adopt the firm communautaire handshake and the Euro-grin. Returning to Heathrow or London City, they affect the furrowed brow and the wry, 'bloody foreigners' shrug whenever the Brussels Eurocracy or the Common Agricultural Policy is mentioned.

In Brussels they work furiously for the European future. But they must woo a constituency base that is overwhelmingly Eurosceptic in order to be re-elected. Implicated though they are in the new confederacy, their election literature often celebrates their resistance to the Delorsian fanatics.

They are all touchingly anxious to talk. Westminster MPs live in a sly, wheedling, jaded climate where every conversation is a deal. In contrast, there is an almost pastoral innocence about Brussels. Slump down over lunch or the 19th coffee of the morning - both much better than the sly wheedlers get - and they will expose their souls. They want to be known.

'What this place needs,' says Tom Spencer, 'is some sketch writers so that people can see that we're all different, like real people. We're not just a grey, homogenised mass.'

The European Parliament functions on deals, compromise and negotiation. A coalition culture prevails. There are broad right-left divisions, but these are muddied by exotic subdivisions and national interest. Tories may frequently have to get into bed with socialists in a way that is inexplicable to party managers back home.

This fragmented, compromising culture intensifies the contrast with home. In Brussels there is a god - Europe - in whom all believe and under whose benign gaze they can all unite. Westminster is a godless place where ignorant armies clash by night against a backdrop of savage, Europhobic headlines, the like of which are seen nowhere else on the Continent.

'The press coverage,' says Margaret Daly, Euro MP for Somerset and Dorset West, 'is outrageous.'

And, of course, the coverage is predicated on the assumption that the Euro MPs are riding a Brussels gravy train, an endless round of lunches and freebies. The limited truth behind this is that, yes, the Euro MPs have much better facilities than their Westminster counterparts, the allowances are generous, they are politically freer and the party lash is almost ignorably light.

On the other hand, the pay of British Euro MPs is half that of their Italian colleagues and a third that of the Germans. They don't say they want more money, but they do mention the discrepancies quite regularly.

But none of this is more than background to the eternally simmering issue that boiled over last week - the relationship to the Tory party back home. There is edgy bafflement about this new crisis. 'What's come over the party?' asks Sir Fred Catherwood, Cambridge and North Bedfordshire. 'Do you know?'

'We could be looking,' says Lord Inglewood, Cumbria and Lancashire North, 'at the end of the Tory party as we know it.'

They are shocked because, although Eurosceptical noise is not new, the voting issue seems like a crazy, self-inflicted wound. Suddenly, having pushed heartily for enlargement, Britain has lurched into a nationalist wrecking exercise.

'What do you think our problem is?' I ask Jrgen Schrder, an east German observer.

'The spirit of Mrs Thatcher has a destructive effect on the Tories,' replies. 'She seems to be some sort of Ubermutter - everything John Major does has to be weighed against her.'

Thatcher as Ubermutter, the stern, judging presence. It is a good psychoanalytical joke. But it changes nothing. The Euro MPs still face a bleak future. After the election in June they will face more years of Eurosceptical noise and policy madness from Westminster. Meanwhile the European Parliament will be acquiring more real powers - notably electing Jacques Delors' successor. The two elements must combine to tempt the Euro-Tories to distance themselves further from the Westminster party, to go native in a big way.

Questioned about this, they turn it over in their hands as if examining an exotic flower. It seems impossible. They need the constituency workers, they need the whole party organisation. Brussels may be Europe, but Cumbria and Somerset are still Yookay.

'We need the central party,' says Bill Newton Dunn, Lincolnshire, 'we need the big hitters.'

On the other hand, a dysfunctional Westminster party could wreck the next five years for those Tories that survive June. Plus, somewhere in the middle, there will be a British general election and that could force a painful knight-fork upon the Euro MPs.

Say the Tories win and a shiny new Eurosceptical intake predominates. 'We could pull out, or effectively pull out,' says one Euro MP, definitely off the record, 'and that could wreck Europe.'

So that makes a Labour victory preferable, even for a true Tory Europhile? He nods thoughtfully.

Meanwhile, in the midst of these apocalyptic omens, life in Brussels ticks over. The European People's Party - the centre-right group to which the Tories belong - meets and agonises in a room full of bottles of orange juice; none is ever drunk because no bottle-openers are provided. Votes happen suddenly in the chamber, sending MEPs scurrying through the underground corridors. John Stevens, Thames Valley or the M4 as he likes to call his constituency, entertains constituency workers.

'Well,' they keep saying, 'fancy us being here this week . . .'

The whole complex - building site, parking hell, grey corridors and sudden moments of flag-laden architectural ceremony - maintains an intense, ant-like busy-ness. You might laugh. They are running in circles. Nuke the lot, you might think, and who would notice? You might look at the dislocated cross of the Berlaymont building and laugh that it is empty because of asbestos problems. You might laugh at their earnest debates and directives on eels, sausages and fish. And it is funny.

But Europeans don't kill each other and some new, real things are happening. Perhaps that is the result of a process rather than the simple signing of a treaty, and perhaps Brussels is that process. Maybe what we have here is the European talking cure and, like psychoanalysis, it goes on forever.

If so, then 32 poor bloody Tory foot soldiers really have a grievance. They talk while the Westminster party lurches, screams and faints. Mrs Thatcher treated them like dirt and Mr Major doesn't treat them like anything. Meanwhile nobody, Mr Hurd included, can seem to grasp that Europe is now moving rapidly from an inter-governmental stitch-up to full parliamentary authority. The Tory Euro MPs explain and explain, but nobody listens.

For an outside perspective on these poor creatures, I speak to Geoff Hoon, a Labour Euro MP who is standing down now that he has a Westminster seat. He lays down the party line - 'they're a laughing stock . . . they'll get no relief', and so on.

'But,' I say, 'you're all in this Europe business together. Don't you feel sorry for them?'

'You know, I do,' he says. 'I really do.'