Thursday, December 7, 2006

Dave makes it up

I just posted a coment over at Tory diary, it appears they all fell for the hype created by CCO's press office.
Talking to people who were a the meeting he said few of those things that were flagged up. No "culture of hopelessness" no going on about how the Tory MEPs were going to become an engine of change. And no row about EPP membership, despite the prescence of Helmer, Hannan etc. Indeed from what I understand the meeting was hijacked by the more pro-EPP members going on about how enormously influential they were.
"I got this rapporteurship because of our links with the EPP". "I served on that Committee because of my alliance with a big group".
One comment I heard was, "All you could see of Timothy was the soles of his feet", so sycophantic he was to Dave.

After an hour of this Cameron left fast and got out of the Parliament, having made it clear that he did not want any photographs in the Parliament.

He went straight to the European Eco House where he hob-nobbed with Prince Laurent of the Belgians, no doubt discussung the right way to fix a windmill to his roof. Then on to the Commission where he held short metings with a few Commissioners. Mandleson, Trade (entirely EU competence) Dimas, Environment (also EU competence, maybe he boasted about how the New Tories were going to support the Reach chemical directive) and Barroso for a courtesy call.

My favourite snippet from the day was his press conference. In fact it was a brief meeting with a selected group of British hacks for 15 minutes in a hotel coffee shop by the Commission building. As one of them put it to me, "that'll be 3 questions, with no follow up - not sure if I can be bothered, I can always get the story from somebody else".