Morning:
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What is the French for "Things Can Only Get Better"? Something, I suppose, along the lines of: "Les Choses Ne Peuvent Que S'améliorer."
Well, we will find out soon enough, when Tony Blair makes official his private campaign to be the first President of Europe and the New Labour soundbite machine goes into continental overdrive.
Brace yourself for a pan-European festival of Nineties Blairite retro: we shall doubtless hear a lot about "la main de l'histoire" settling on the former Prime Minister's shoulder and his conviction that he would indeed be "le President du Peuple".
If the very thought makes you shudder - didn't we get rid of him more than two years ago? - then blame Vaclav Klaus.
Over the weekend, the Czech President removed the last obstacle to the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, conceding that, for all his doubts about the repackaged EU constitution, "the train has already travelled so fast and so far that I guess it will not be possible to stop it or turn it around, however much we would wish to".
And thus, with a Bohemian whimper, does it become inevitable that Lisbon will come into force across the EU's 27 member states, and with it the new European presidency that Blair covets.
The discussion of candidates is expected to begin at a Brussels summit in two weeks' time.
The former Prime Minister is by no means a shoo-in, and Angela Merkel is only the most powerful head of government to have equivocal feelings about his candidacy.
That said, he is still the runaway favourite in a relatively undistinguished field - ahead of Jan Peter Balkenende, the Dutch prime minister, and Jean-Claude Juncker, the prime minister of Luxembourg.
Unlike his successor in Number Ten, Blair is reasonably impervious to criticism. But he will have been stung by the opinion of his former chief adviser on the EU, Sir Stephen Wall, that having someone like him as Europe's President was "not necessarily a very good idea."
Better, added Sir Stephen, that the first occupant of the new office should be from a smaller member state: "I think that it would help a lot as a signal. As a unifying signal, it should be thought about."
Certainly, Blair's election would be intrinsically divisive. The co-author of the liberation of Iraq has not been forgiven by Old Europe, and is still widely scorned on the Continent as a neo-con poodle and ally of the despised George W Bush.
The structure of the electoral college - 27 states with weighted votes - is such that the winning candidate will be the product of compromise rather than enthusiasm.
As the gulf between political elites and electorates grows wider across recession-torn Europe, it is a very strange way to choose the most senior political representative of the EU.
As the peasant woman played by Terry Jones says to King Arthur in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: "Well, I didn't vote for you."
In Blair's home country, of course, the hostility to his return to grand public office, less then three years after he left Number Ten, would be much compounded by the fact that the British electorate was unforgivably denied the referendum he himself promised on the EU constitution in April 2004.
As William Hague has argued cogently, the British people's sense that the EU is all about diktats and unaccountable power will only be aggravated by the imposition upon them, without referendum or election, of President Blair.
Oddly enough, I think Blair himself is partly in agreement with the public on this score: he always wanted to dramatise his vision of Britain's role in Europe in a single great undertaking - the euro, the EU constitution - and to secure the endorsement of the British people for that vision.
I recall him looking distinctly rueful towards the end of his years in Number Ten as he reflected upon the fact that there was no "moment of reckoning" on Britain's European destiny while he was in office.
"Let the issue be put and let the battle be joined!" he told the Commons when he announced the referendum on the original EU Constitutional Treaty. But that moment never came. Blair waged many wars, but this was the war that got away.
So there is much unfinished business for Blair in all this - which helps explain why he would swap his lucrative and diverse portfolio of pursuits for the bureaucratic cemetery of Brussels.
I keep reading that President Blair, if elected, would have no powers and no authority. As if that would stop him trotting the globe, taking the lead at summits, shaking hands with his fellow President Obama as often as possible, and posturing as the political leader of 500 million Europeans.
Those who imagine that Blair would confine himself humbly to the role of spokesman for the 27 heads of government have forgotten what he is really like.
If we must have an EU President - and I don't see why we do - then the former PM is certainly the best candidate available. But be in no doubt about the consequences.
And just imagine, for a moment, what it might be like for the newly-elected Prime Minister Cameron to find himself working with and often pitted against President Blair.
It is one thing to acknowledge your respect for a past Prime Minister, as the Tory leader often does; quite another to find him storming back greedily for seconds, and generally making a nuisance of himself. Does anyone know the French for "backseat driver"?
Reader views (6)
The man who refused to honour his promised vote on Europe becomes its unelected President.
Sort of perfect.
- Tv, Hounslow, UK, 20/10/2009 16:54
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Let Blair return to Europe simply long enough to seize
his pasport, freeze his and 'her's assets, arresting him using European Arrest Warrants and ensure he gets police protection all the way to Den Hague and the International War Crimes Tribunals, where he has far more important business to answer to, ie: an unlawful invasion, causing the unnecessary deaths of thousands of both Iraqi's and British service personnel.
Nothing less will do.
- Ken.H, Harrow. UK, 19/10/2009 18:33
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Putting aside Iraq for a moment( and a pertinent point over Iraq is that Blair has benefited remuneratively from his decision to support America; indeed it has been the making of him finacially), the essential problem is that Blair is hopeless at negotiation, diplomacy, intellectual leadership and all the qualities that a serious EC president requires. He has only ever got by in international talks through his charm, a cheesy grin, an ingratiating friendliness and the readiness to give the other party more or less what they want. He lacks maturity, wisdom and thoroughness. I f I were a foreign head of state and I saw Blair with grin and outstreched palm walking to greet me, I would think "what can I not get out of this eager to please adolescent".
- Stephen, oxford, 19/10/2009 17:45
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Europe does not want Blair- “Tony Blair’s actions while in office should be under severe scrutiny as part of a criminal investigation, and yet whitewashes and silence prevail. He is apparently beyond the law, making decisions which benefit himself at the cost of thousands of lives. The idea that he should be permitted to be president of the EU is abhorrent, and his nomination should be rejected.” Signatories to the Stop Blair Petition now at over 39,000 signatures.How we can even contemplate putting at the head of Europe a man whose innappropriate & disproportionate response to 9/11 unleashed a sequence of disaster & death, beggars belief.
- Strappara, Durham, Durham, 19/10/2009 16:54
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If Bliar becomes the president of Europe then we shall all be incorporated in to the US as extra states.I am all for a united Europe but not under HIS leadership.!
- Thomas Hayes, Leeds UK, 19/10/2009 12:41
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Tony Bliar is a shameless war criminal who traded our EU rebate to further his megalomania.
- Hwicci, Cheltenham, 19/10/2009 11:24
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