Mildly, moistly Thatcherite is what this European Commission would like to be

If you want to discombobulate a Eurocrat, try calling him a Thatcherite. Gert-Jan Koopman, the European Commission’s otherwise articulate director of industrial policy and economic reform, threw up his hands in silent horror when I lobbed the epithet at him, though I meant it as a compliment. The game in Brussels these days — so I learnt from half a dozen conversations within a stone’s throw of the ultimate in glass houses, the Commission’s re-clad Berlaymont headquarters — is to advance a smaller-government, less-red-tape, jobs-and-growth agenda.