Still, it’s good to have it all wrapped up after the Irish no vote, and to a lesser extent the Czechs and David Cameron. And I think van Rompuy will be an efficient consensus builder and chairman, rather than president, of the Council.

I also disagree that it was an opportunity to have people who’d be loved, hated, etc. Given that they are largely going to be executing policy set by the Commission or the Council, this would just have been more vacuous celebrity politics. Had enough of that. Now they’ll have to earn those emotions.

Also, the notion of Ashton being incompetent is probably derived from the fact her chief political achievement was Sure Start – i.e. both socialism and women’s work.

His argument was a classic EU appointment by elimination: A center-right head of government, not from a big country, and not from a new member. That left Sweden and the Benelux states. Luxembourg is just too small, and Sweden holds the presidency right now; he thought that meant both were out of the running. Seven years in office meant that the Dutch PM had had time to make enemies.

Here’s his view on the eventual winner, “in his ten months as prime minister he has rescued Belgium from the point of institutional collapse which it reached under his disastrous predecessor, and thus has a proven record of getting people with different native languages and very different political perspectives to work together. He won’t be a tremendously high profile EU president, but he will be a consensus-building figure who will make his bits of the institutions work and not interfere with other people’s turf – be that member states or other senior EU officials.”

Since a small-country Christian democrat got the top job, the number two goes to a big-country social democrat. Brussels Gonzo had expected David Millibrand, but otherwise laid out the process. He was also positive about van Rompuy’s prospects for success.

The more I think about this, the more irritated I get. Our only chance to kick-start a pan-European public sphere was to populate the top posts with figures fit to be loved, hated, or at least recognized across Europe. Are the powers that be so afraid of the public that they’re willing to kneecap the European project just to avoid bringing colourful disagreement into Brussels?