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

Brussels

‘I really like your magazine,’ says the president of the European Commission, welcoming The Spectator to the inner sanctum of his suite on the top floor of the Berlaymont building, the EC’s headquarters.

Euro-schmooze? Of course. But, in the world of EU politics, it is progress of a kind. Imagine, say, Jacques Santer or Jacques Delors steeling himself to praise an avowedly Eurosceptic British magazine. English may be the fourth language of José Manuel Barroso, the former Portuguese prime minister, but he has evidently put it to good use.

So before we can get started on British outrage over federalism, the EU constitution and qualified majority voting, the 50-year-old Commission president is recalling The Spectator subscription he maintained as Portugal’s foreign minister in the early 1990s.

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.