Yes could see Blair as Europe's president
A No verdict won't stop moves towards integration and may relegate Ireland to the EU slow lane, writes Ivor Roberts
AS the old adage goes, the fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one great thing. (Archilochus c 680BC - c. 645BC, to save you googling it.) The one big thing that even the smallest hedgehog knows about British politics is that Europe has the ability to divide political parties and destroy their electoral chances.
Mrs Thatcher's vigorous, some might say brutal, defence of British interests (who can forget her impassioned and viscerally arousing cry of "we want our money back"?) was one among many of the reasons for her electoral success.
But it was ultimately her rigidity over Europe which lost her some of the biggest beasts in her cabinet: Heseltine, Lawson and Howe, and which led to her downfall. The Conservatives have now been out of power for 12 years but are odds-on to replace Labour in government in the next six to eight months.
At their party conference next month, only a few days after the Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, the Conservatives will have to decide how to react to the Irish vote.
An Irish Yes will put them on the spot. Their own pledge to hold a referendum after the Brown government previously got off the hook for a referendum on the Constitutional Treaty will be largely futile if the Lisbon Treaty has entered into force. So they will be left hoping that the Eurosceptic Czech President Klaus will hold back his signature until a Cameron government can organise a referendum on the treaty, one which would undoubtedly result in the treaty being lost.
An Irish No will certainly kill Lisbon off without the need for a referendum in the UK, though the Conservatives may well want to have one anyway to underscore the public support for their root-and-branch hostility to any further European integration. But that doesn't mean the integrationists will resign themselves to failure and no further integrating measures.
It does mean that they will immediately plan a two-speed or variable geometry EU from which Britain will auto-exclude itself.
So for the Irish voter, the decision is clear: vote No for a two-speed Europe and one in which, apart from Ireland's membership of the eurozone, she will have to be careful not to be relegated to the slow lane, as Brigid Laffan, who chairs the Ireland for Europe group, warned a few days ago.
An intriguing question, and one which is certain to arise sooner rather than later if Ireland votes Yes and the Lisbon Treaty enters into force, is who is to become the new President of Europe. The job description in the Lisbon Treaty suggests the main job will be chairing meetings of the European Council, the regular meetings of heads of state or government. But the reality is that he or she will be the person who will answer the Kissinger question posed 30 years ago by the US Secretary of State: "Who do I call when I want to call Europe?"
The one candidate who might be thought to have the hedgehog quality is Tony Blair. He knows one big thing at a time: Northern Ireland and Iraq being the obvious examples of the good and the bad hedgehog at work.
Blair certainly has the ability to face down other European leaders. But would it not seem odd for Europe to choose as its interface with the outside world someone who for 10 years failed to persuade Gordon Brown of the merits of joining the euro (despite his own personal conviction that it would be the right policy) and divided Europe disastrously ("old and new Europe" in Donald Rumsfeld's dismissive phrase) over the invasion of Iraq?
The German chancellor and the French president appear to be prepared to forgive and forget the Iraq imbroglio. But the Conservatives, having originally appeared unfazed about a Blair appointment, have now attacked it in vigorous terms.
Insufficiently European for some on the Left in Europe, he would for the Right, particularly in Britain, have the opposite fault.
For an Irish voter, not that any will be allowed to vote in this ultimately undemocratic presidential election, a further consideration might be the fact that the drafters of the treaty, (and I spoke to the man who drafted this section of it last week,) envisage that the president of the council's job should ultimately be merged with that of president of the commission.
Given the importance smaller countries rightly attach to the commission's role in protecting their rights and interests, this proposed merger should cause some unease.
It must be right for the European Council and the commission to coexist in a state of useful tension not joined at the hip by a common president.
Ruling such a merger out would have been a further useful 'clarification' for the Irish government to have extracted from the EU.
Sir Ivor Roberts, President of Trinity College, Oxford, is a former British Ambassador to Italy, Ireland and Yugoslavia.
- Ivor Roberts
