Britain sets a high bar for incomprehension in Europe - by Quentin Peel
The capacity of the British to misread the politics of Europe appears to know no bounds. If it were not so incompetent, it would be funny. Instead it is both alarming and sad. The latest example comes with the UK government campaign to transform Tony Blair, former prime minister, into the first permanent president of the European Council. It is a case of the wrong man for the wrong job at the wrong time. It comes hard on the heels of the stunning political blunder of the British Conservative party in flouncing out of its long-standing alliance with the main centre-right grouping of European politics – the European People’s party. Instead David Cameron, the probable next British prime minister, and William Hague, his shadow foreign secretary, have cobbled together a brittle coalition of also-ran rightwingers in the European parliament. Some say their views are distasteful. More important, they are irrelevant.
In turning their backs on the EPP the Tories have managed to baffle and alienate their most important future political allies – Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France, to name but two – and exclude themselves from an essential forum for negotiating the policy (and personality) compromises that are at the heart of the consensual European Union political process. Mr Cameron does not seem to care.
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