Euro-wicket won't take spin

The EU Presidency taught Tony Blair that European leaders are not as malleable as his MPs, writes Katherine Butler

ONLY when the reporters sitting in front of him in the EU council of ministers press room stopped taking notes, pulled off their headphones impatiently and began to talk loudly among themselves did Robin Cook betray slight unease.

British civil servants shifted from one foot to the other and cast their eyes to the floor in embarrassment, but the Foreign Secretary raised his voice to drown out the chatter.

He carried on for about 10 minutes, not stopping until he had listed each one of his personal victories among the 45 triumphs notched up by Cool Britannia, the holders of the EU presidency.

This bizarre scene occurred three months ago when the Foreign Secretary interrupted a Brussels news conference on a Turkey-Cyprus crisis and the enlargement of the European Union to announce that a glowing half-term scoresheet had arrived from London. The league table of "45 achievements" on which the Government was so keen to congratulate itself included such triumphs as Margaret Beckett making a speech about the importance of modern businesses in the European Parliament, and the launch of phase 2 of something called the Citizens First Initiative.

Chastened by the underwhelmed reaction to this piece of hype in Brussels, Downing Street has quietly shelved plans to publish an end of term presidency scoresheet ahead of the Cardiff summit. Sir Stephen Wall, Britain's ambassador to the EU, whose advice was overruled by the Downing Street spin doctors in March has had his way this time.

Although it will be notably absent from the press packs in Cardiff, the Cabinet Office could not resist drawing up an end of term report card, privately patting itself on the back. It contains well over a hundred "items agreed and other successes" - including, for example, bringing TV cameras into a top-level foreign policy meeting which gets smug praise as "a first". The document also includes the 1 May wrangle over the European Central Bank which marred the historic launch of the euro.

Here, in the column marked "comments: why significant", it says simply: "Hard negotiation successfully concluded by PM". As this was prepared by his own loyal servants, there is no trace of "Tony didn't do his homework" or "Tony lacks experience" - the kind of remarks which reverberated around EU capitals in the hours and days after the May summit.

The low point of the presidency saw what should have been a historic occasion degenerate into near-farce as the French, Dutch and Germans fell out and the chairman left 11 other prime ministers sitting around a lunch table for almost 10 hours. No fault for the dispute itself could be laid at Mr Blair's door. But he was accused of being "ill prepared" and of making tactical negotiating errors which betrayed his lack of appreciation for the inclusive nature of European political deal-making. If, by contrast, the summit which opens tomorrow in Cardiff Castle goes smoothly, Mr Blair's presidency will be portrayed as a success.

If the conduct of the Presidency is anything to go by, what counts for the Blair team at Cardiff will be less the substance than the style. With no great defining decisions to be taken it will be a "Blair launches re- branded Europe" kind of story, with the emphasis firmly on the domestic audience.

In PR terms there is still plenty that can go wrong. With elections looming, Helmut Kohl could be attending his last EU summit after 16 years in power. He needs a good scrap to show German voters what he's made of. The Spanish, meanwhile, are gearing up for a fightback if Mr Kohl demands a Thatcher-style rebate on Bonn's contribution to the EU's coffers. And heated exchanges over policy on Turkey cannot be ruled out.

All of which goes to prove that EU presidencies cannot be stage-managed in the way the Blair team seemed to imagine when they launched theirs at Waterloo Eurostar terminal last December. The ambitions were lofty and pious, nothing less than to assume the role of leaders and agenda setters in Europe.

What the British failed to grasp was that to hold the EU presidency is to be a caretaker or an overseer. " You take whatever comes along on the conveyor belt," said one diplomat, "and your job is to solve problems". Unless your term happens to coincide with momentous change, you can never expect to satisfy ambitions as exaggerated as those set out at Waterloo.

Ironically, most people who have had to work directly with the British presidency have few quibbles apart from the debacle over the EMU launch.

There were some blunders born of arrogance including the brush with Rome after the depiction of Italy on the UK presidency logo with a pizza and the (hastily revoked) decision to exclude Italian and Spanish interpretation facilities at a key meeting on EU enlargement.

On the day-to-day running of EU business, the presidency was generally judged competent and professional. Indeed it would be surprising if the British civil service did not acquit itself better than most in this role.

Mr Cook wins praise as a fine chairman, although some of Britain's foreign policy initiatives drew fire. Turkey flew into a rage after being sidelined for EU membership and snubbed a high profile conference of 26 European leaders in London in March, robbing the entire event of its raison d'etre. Mr Cook's visit to Israel did not, as he claimed, "inject new impetus" into the embers of the Middle East peace process.

Concrete achievements were modest but solid, such as securing agreement for an EU arms export code, a directive on consumer guarantees, a ban on drift net fishing and a law which makes driving disqualification in one EU country applicable Europe-wide, which had been blocked for seven years.

Throughout there was an obsession with positive self image and media manipulation, a strategy which made people quicker to pick up on failures or omissions. Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, drew attention to Britain's political marginalisation on EMU by insisting on muscling in on the inaugural meeting of the single currency inner circle, Euro-XI, even though there was no role for him. This prompted derisory comments, such as the EU ambassador who suggested the Chancellor had brought himself down to the level of "a gatecrasher".

Yet although Tony Blair and Gordon Brown still preach about the virtues of the British economic model - the "third way" to prosperity and jobs, and the ill-defined need for a "people's Europe" - there are signs of a change in tone.

Mr Blair has been forced to accept that the EU is not a club of docile backbenchers carrying pagers. The European press is impossible to contain in the way that much of the national media can be managed. The formidable Labour spin machine simply crumbles when transferred to Brussels, because Britain is just one player and there are 14 other governments and a highly leaky bureaucracy to turn to.

Last Tuesday, sitting in the British ambassador's residence in Brussels, Tony Blair admitted publicly for the first time that the Euro summit he chaired in May was "a mess". He also said Britain would have to get into "a different frame of mind" about Europe and stop seeing every disagreement as a fundamental crisis. This was music to many ears in Brussels.

One diplomat summed it up: "He is finally learning that he has got to listen to us as well, that we in Europe are not just extras in a New Labour promotional video."