European leaders were inching towards a deal in the early hours of Friday morning that would see the first cut in the EU's budget in its 56-year history.
David Cameron, who had demanded a freeze in real terms in the near-€1tn budget, was planning to claim victory after the European council president proposed a €34.4bn cut over the next seven years.
Herman Van Rompuy finally tabled his budget proposals in Brussels at 6am after a night of haggling at the EU summit that was described by one official as like a "bazaar".
Shortly before 6.30am, the EU's 27 leaders filed into the council chamber to debate Van Rompuy's proposal to cut the "payment ceiling", likened to a credit card limit, for the next seven-year budget from €942.8bn to €908.4bn. Van Rompuy proposed cutting the higher "commitment ceiling" from €993.6bn for the last budget from 2007-13 to €960bn for 2014-20.
Dalia Grybauskaite, the Lithuanian president who was the EU's budget commissioner during the last negotiations in 2005, indicated at around 4am that the EU was on the verge of agreeing its first budget cut. The EU has agreed seven-year budgets since 1993.
Read more: EU on brink of historic budget cut after all-nighter in Brussels | World news | The Guardian
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