I really do think that could come to depend on how developments unfold in the future, especially if pressures mount for obsessive harmonisation of taxes and regulations in the EU.

de Villepan maybe :). What I mean is that DdV has 100 days, after that he too could be out. Sarkozy really doesn’t need that job if he wants it easy in 2007.

“the EU and for the Euro in Britain”

I think we need to separate the two things Bob. The euro is shelved in the UK, as it probably is in Denmark, Sweden and the Czech Republic. What would be needed to put it back on again would be some real evidence that the ‘one size fits all’ can work. Absent that there is no debate for the UK.

Now the EU is different: the EU really isn’t in question for the UK, despite the fact that some people publish books advocating leaving. If the main opposition party continues along that road, it simply becomes unelectable. Period.

So what Blair has done, is a kind of ‘lesser evil’ thing. He has taken the responsibility for bringing this round of the great constitution show to an end. In public he will be criticised by some EU leaders, but in private they will thank him for getting them off the hook. All in all his political capital can only rise. This can begin to become the issue that can help heal the Iraq wounds. Am I sounding too much like Mandelson?

He has also avoided a year of heated and pretty pointless debate in the UK.

What happens next. British pragmatism. You can’t enter through the front door, so you send the workman round to the side entrance. The ‘great constitution project’ will be quietly shelved for the time being - the last thing Sarkozy or Merkel want is another referendum process any time soon, not with big reforms to the welfare systems coming - and there will be a whole series of ‘piecemeal’ reforms to the administrative system, all of them just small enough not to need a popular consultation.

Sarkozy must be in heaven right now. Is hard to see who will stop him in 2007.

A hardcopy of Patrick Minford’s new book: Should Britain Leave the EU? (Edward Elgar / IEA) dropped through my letterbox this morning:
http://www.iea.org.uk/record.jsp?type=publication&ID=274

In France, the purging has already started:

“The deputy leader of France’s Socialist Party, Laurent Fabius, has been sacked after he broke ranks with the party and campaigned against the EU constitution. At the instigation of Socialist leader Francois Hollande, the party voted for a new list of leaders that excluded Mr Fabius and several allies.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world…ope/ 4609989.stm

Precedents from earlier times of what tends to happen when the French fall out among themselves are rather ominous so we should be suitably sympathetic:

” . . In what became known as the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 24 August - 17 September 1572 Catholics killed many Huguenots in Paris; similar massacres took place in other towns in the weeks following, with an estimated total death toll of 70,000. . . Persecution of Protestants ended in 1764 . . ”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huguenots