A question of loyalty

The old lefty Neil Kinnock backs Britain, says Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. But Chris Patten is batting for France.

Brussels hen push comes to shove, I think I know which side Neil Kinnock is on. Eight years in Brussels — as proprietaire of Boris Johnson's crummy old digs at 76 rue van Carnpenhout — have not really gone to his head. Yes, he appears dutifully on the BBC as vice-president of the European Commission to justify persecution of the Metric Martyrs, while spitting off-air at the madness of hounding a Newcastle grocer for selling bananas by the pound. Just as dutifully, he once upheld the Labour policy of British withdrawal from Europe, against his better judgment, waiting until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 before committing his party to the position that served it so well — until this week. But that is because he is a man who values loyalty and discipline.

Toiling in the engine room of the EU, he nudges forward the cause of free markets. If we, today, can fly the whole family to Pisa for £100 on Ryanair, it is in no small part because Neil Kinnock faced down the airline monopolies as transport commissioner. If the director-general of agriculture is no longer, by divine right, a Frenchman, it is because Kinnock has broken up the national fiefdoms in his slow, painful reform of the EU's bureaucracy. He does exactly what a commissioner should do. He reflects the philosophy of the country he represents, without breaking his pledge and treaty obligation to work impartially for Europe's collective interest.

Whatever his deepest feelings about the Iraq war, he never forgot that he had at least a minimal duty not to make matters worse at a very delicate moment for the government that had appointed him. So while others ran down their own country at those intimate little dinners, over Cabillaud and Cote du Jura, in the timbered upstairs room at Chez Marius, usually at taxpayers' expense, he stuck up for Tony Blair.

'It wasn't lap-doggery-, anything but,' he pleaded. It was intended to coax the Americans back into the international system. A lifelong member of CND, he stood his ground in the epicentre of anti-Americanism and attempted to subtilise the American invasion of a sovereign country. in defiance of the United Nations and postwar precedent, because to do otherwise would be faintly. . . urn. . . disloyal, perhaps?

I am not sure which side Chris Patten is on. To be honest, he strikes me off the list of British hacks invited to his luncheon briefings, which are rare in any case. I offended him three years ago by disclosing that he was counting the days and hours before his release from the excruciating boredom of Brussels — making it sound as if the former governor of Hong Kong saw himself a notch above his colleagues. (They were miffed.) But I noticed his remark in Australia — 'I'm a European carrying a British passport' — and his knack of causing maximum annoyance to the British government, which he represents, not to mention the Conservative party, which 'chose' him for his lightly taxed £145,000 salary (plus university fees for the girls, plus 15 per cent residence allowance, etc.) on the understanding that he would embody their Burkean views.

So what does he do, just as the Cabinet sits down to thrash out its policy on the euro? He rubbishes Gordon Brown's five tests as 'drivel'. He plants a carefully crafted article in the Times accusing the government of 'patronising prevarication', and mocks Tony Blair for allowing his Chancellor to carry out a putsch. An outsider might be forgiven for thinking he was trying to inflict damage. though Patten's aides insist that the real Mandelsonian goal was to help the pro-euro faction within the government. 'You'd be very wrong to think that his motivation is to undermine Britain, and we don't agree that a commissioner who always sides with the government has his country's best interests at heart,' said his spokeswoman, Emma Udwin,

Still, one would have thought that the latest travails of the eurozone would vindicate a little caution on EMU. The economists who actually deal with the euro inside the European institutions — as opposed to the politicians of the 'College' — are often as brutally Eurosceptic as the British public. 'Do they think it is going to get any easier?' laughed one senior Eurocrat, when I suggested that the government was hoping to have another go at the euro next year. He, for one, fears that Germany is on the cusp of a deflationary spiral. It needs interest rates of zero and an emergency fiscal stimulus. What does it get? More or less the same mix of policies that shut down the American banking system in the Great Depression. And why? Because inflation in Ireland, Portugal, Greece and Spain is still too high, and because the Stability Pact forces Germany to raise taxes in a slump. Keynes must be weeping in his grave.

Like the US Federal Reserve in those crucial months of 1930, the European Central Bank — over-hawkish because unsure of itself — is still fretting about inflation as the economy risks tipping into a deflationary debt crisis. Knowing what we now know about the 1930s, it seems remarkable that any democratic country would again embark on such a destructive course. But the eurozone is not a country, or a democracy. Is Mr Patten even aware that officials in his own Commission, who know whereof they speak, are trembling at the onset of a euro debacle, just waiting for the day when the bond markets twig that the game is already up in Portugal?

Launching a campaign to undercut his own government's policy on the euro is bad enough, but Mr Patten's capital crime has been to undercut the efforts of Tony Blair to preserve the Atlantic alliance in rather desperate circumstances. Personally, I agree with Mr Patten that the Bush administration has handled its diplomacy carelessly, and that for the modest prize of ousting Saddam Hussein (if there is a prize) it has 'lost Europe', which is not a sensible trade-off. America's bodylanguage today — decidedly hostile — will shape the new Europe just as it hatches into a fully-fledged constitutional state, with its own elected president, foreign minister, finance minister, justice department and Euro-army, seeking to make itself felt in the world. It is now much more likely that this new Union, perhaps allied to Russia, will turn nasty. Did the Bushies ever think of this, and what it may mean? Or do they believe their own chatter that Europe is so permanently enfeebled that it can do no harm, even if malevolent?

But I am just a journalist; Mr Patten is a British commissioner. Should he have put himself in the forefront of those lashing out at the United States over the last two years, outdoing Jacques Chirac, and sending Belgium's Louis Michel into fits of convulsive delight? Should he have played to the gallery of socialists, communists and greens in the European Parliament, daring to be the Englishman who bucks the Special Relationship, and do it with an acid tongue? Should he have been throwing fuel on the fire in the Washington Post, accusing the city's elite of harbouring a 'visceral contempt for Europe'? Should he have reproached the White House for pursuing narrow self-interest and 'imposing her will unilaterally' on the rest of the world, or derided President Bush's axis-of-evil speech? Javier Solana, the Elis other foreign-policy chief (once an anti-American leftist, but now grown up), did no such things.

Mr Patten does not have an easy row to hoe as the external relations commissioner. Above all, he must reflect EU consensus. But where Javier Solana discerned consensus in the middle of the Channel, Chris Patten discerned it near Paris. He looked to some as the English-speaking foreign minister of the Franco–German–Belgian rump, the trio that came within a whisker of destroying Nato by refusing to authorise Patriot missile deployments to Turkey, in breach of their treaty obligations. Arguably, 16 of the Elis 27 current and future states either backed or acquiesced in the war. Popular opinion was another matter. In Spain, 90 per cent opposed their own leader. The Poles were shocked to discover that they had special forces in Basra. But if Mr Patten looks for guidance in opinion polls, not governments, then why is he so deaf to British opinion on the euro?

Neil Kinnock has his outbursts too, but they expose a different reflex. That bloody thing,' he growled when we spoke about the European Convention, now drawing up the final text of our first written constitution. Paris has yet to seduce him. While others try to make the European system work. he told me, the French do 'just what they damn well like'. The Tories have called for his head over the fiasco of Marta Andreasen. He suspended the Argentine-Spaniard last year as Commission chief accountant after she blew the whistle, revealing that insiders could dip into the EU's 98 billion euro budget without leaving an electronic fingerprint in the computer system, almost as if it were designed to permit theft.

Mr Kinnock has a problem here: a leaked memo written for him by his own special troubleshooter, endorsing her claims as 'factually substantive and correct'. It describes her budget directorate as a place of 'arm-twisting', where 'might makes right whatever one's professional convictions', run by a French director-general — since promoted — who 'did not see the need for any accounting system at all'. But even in this mess, Mr Kinnock has behaved with some gallantly. He has gone out of his way to carry the can for the German budget commissioner, Michaele Schreyer, when others might have tried harder to spread the blame. In reality it was almost entirely her fault. Mrs Schreyer buckled under pressure from a group of fonctionnaires who were suspiciously determined to keep a system that cannot safeguard taxpayers' money. She let the bastards crucify me,' said Mrs Andreasen. 'It wasn't Kinnock's fault.'

Without question, Chris Patten is one of the few stars of Brussels. But he has long since ceased to be a Tory, and, by his own admission, his British passport is now just a technicality. As he brings his great talents to Oxford — my own birthplace and home town — I can only hope that he does not deploy them by belittling the university that has just chosen him as chancellor.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is Brussels correspondent for the Daily Telegraph.