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

8 July 2006

There is a long silence, and then a sigh. ‘Look, the Americans believe it. This question of Atlanticism — President Bush has been here 16 times. He came here to the Commission itself, to where you are sitting now. The world has changed, if you want to cope with globalisation, if you want to defend your national interests, you need a strong regional basis to do it, for very obvious, practical reasons.’

In case Mr Brown is feeling picked on, Mr Barroso is no less firm in his message to the Chancellor’s Conservative rival, David Cameron. The Commission president and the Tory leader have not met, but Mr Barroso is deeply dismayed by Mr Cameron’s plans to pull British Euro MPs out of their alliance with the largest centre-right grouping in the European Parliament, the EPP, to form a new Eurosceptic bloc.

As a former Portuguese prime minister, Mr Barroso remains a senior member of the EPP. He will not have been entirely displeased when Senator John McCain, the leading Republican contender for the US presidency, delivered a rebuke to Mr Cameron over the EPP withdrawal plan during a recent lunch in Brussels. Senator McCain expressed hopes that British Conservatives would ‘appreciate the support they received from the EPP when they were wandering in the wilderness’.

In public, Mr Barroso chooses his words with care, without disguising his true opinion. ‘I don’t want to comment on what is an internal decision of the Conservative party, but what I can tell you, based on experience and practical evidence, is that now it is a very influential group, because it is one of the biggest national groups in the first political family in Europe, and the European Parliament is gaining increased leverage, in fact.’

Mr Barroso’s election, in June 2004, was a bloody drawn-out battle, with Jacques Chirac of France, and Gerhard Schröder of Germany backing a rival candidate, the wildly federalist Belgian prime minister, Guy Verhofstadt. Mr Blair expended considerable energy to get Mr Barroso the job, spending hours on the telephone, calling fellow prime ministers and presidents to lobby for the Portuguese candidate.