| Sourced From Telegraph.co.uk |
No doubt as we contemplate the figure who has rocketed from obscurity to became “the President of Europe”, we have all made silly little jokes about “Mr Rumpy”. After the eight tortuous years it has taken to get the “Constitution for Europe” into place, with all the talk of how vital it was for the EU to have a figurehead to represent Europe on the world stage as the equivalent of the President of the United States, some may now think of the poet Horace’s famous line, parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus (“the mountains are in labour, and will give birth to a ridiculous mouse”).
But it would be wrong to underestimate Herman Van Rompuy, the first permament president of the European Council. This Belgian economist is a clever and ruthless political operator. Once, to win a political battle, he changed the locks to prevent his opponents entering a crucial meeting. (For details of his character, see the Brussels Journal blog by one of his former colleagues, Paul Belien.) And the reason why he was very much the preferred candidate of the European Commission is that the one thing for which President Van Rompuy can be relied on is a determination to use all his crafty skills to further the power of our new government in Brussels.
At the heart of the “European project”, there has always been one core goal in all it does
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