‘Don’t come to a beefeating club if you’re vegetarian’

05 July 2006

Bazza — as his British fans in Brussels call him — reminisces about reading Taki, and explains the walk-on role he played in a ‘Dear Mary’ inquiry, dating back to a 1992 flight he took to Africa with the then foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, and the foreign minister of Denmark.

‘I remember Douglas Hurd wrote to your adviser of good manners, Dear Mary, saying: “Look, what should you do when you are travelling with colleagues in a Royal Air Force plane, and you want to go to bed, but they are talking?” And Mary was answering that maybe he should put the lights off progressively like you do in discotheques, or something.’

Back in Lisbon, Barroso spotted the letter in The Spectator and wrote to Hurd. ‘I said: “Dear Douglas, next time, you just ask your colleagues to go to sleep.”’

Before 2004, when Barroso was enthroned as president, few in Britain had heard of this smooth-talking centre-right politician and former law professor. But in the Foreign Office and No. 10, Barroso was already regarded as an old and reliable friend — a staunch ally of Tony Blair and President George W. Bush over Iraq, who had hosted the final council of war on the eve of the invasion (though he was canny enough to hold the March 2003 summit far from home, on the Azores islands, and to stand on the far edge of the group photograph, so that many foreign newspapers cut him out of their pictures).

Now he presides over the Commission at a hugely tense juncture in its history — a so-called ‘period of reflection’. The EU’s constitutional treaty is in tatters. Its Lisbon agenda for market reform has stalled. And, most significantly, the question of precisely what the European Union is for is being asked with ever greater intensity.

Much of Mr Barroso’s energy is presently devoted to entrenching the single market, under siege from the new populist strains of economic nationalism in Paris, Berlin, Madrid and Rome. He alludes to the regular phone calls he receives from Jacques Chirac and his counterparts, demanding that the Commission bend EU rules to allow politically driven mergers.

‘I cannot go into the details, but if you imagine the pressures coming all the time to accept this kind of merger. I am always resisting this kind of thing,’ he says, with a bitter laugh. Such nationally led populism, such ‘centrifugal tendencies’ put the single market itself at risk, he argues.