Doha can wait

Gordon Brown does a nice job of grabbing the headlines with Peter Mandelson’s return to the Cabinet as Business Secretary.  It’s hard to divine what this means for the European Commission.  Catherine Ashton will take his place as Trade Commissioner and there’s nothing in her background that indicates that she’s as ready as Mandy was to push the WTO negotiations to the point of irritating the EU’s agriculture-intensive states.  In any event, trade has slipped down the list of headlines with the global financial crisis and Mandy has a well-timed opinion piece in the Guardian that clearly crosses into Charlie McCreevy’s banking regulation turf, so it was likely drafted with one eye already on the next job.   In fact, the kind of protectionism that used to draw concern on trade issues has, at least in an intra-EU context, shifted to finance with banking guarantees and bailouts.  As much as anything, Mandelson probably saw better of waiting around another year to push through a trade deal that no one cares about right now.  But can he keep out of trouble in the new job?

This entry was posted on Friday, October 3rd, 2008 at 4:00 pm and is filed under The European Union. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

1. David Weman Says:
   October 3rd, 2008 at 7:34 pm

   So Mandelson’s been an MP for four years while working as commissioner in Brussels? Isn’t that odd?

2. P O'Neill Says:
   October 3rd, 2008 at 8:45 pm

   No he resigned as MP. He has to be appointed to House of Lords to get back into Cabinet.

3. Bondwoman Says:
   October 4th, 2008 at 12:20 am

   I don’t think Ashton will get trade. Won’t Barroso shift things around. She knows next to nothing about the EU. Even Richard Corbett MEP could think of nothing more constructive to say about her contribution to European politics than that “she is very ambiable”. Lovely.

4. Alex Says:
   October 5th, 2008 at 11:55 am

   It’ll be interesting to see if Mandelson tries to return to the Commons; I presume he still wants to be prime minister (and this has just got more realistic) and you can’t realistically be PM in the Lords these days.

5. Gridlock Says:
   October 7th, 2008 at 4:21 pm

   FYI, having links about 3 shades different from body text and using on-mouse-over underlining makes for an unreadable website.