‘Don’t come to a beefeating club if you’re vegetarian’

Brussels

‘I really like your magazine,’ says the president of the European Commission, welcoming The Spectator to the inner sanctum of his suite on the top floor of the Berlaymont building, the EC’s headquarters.

Euro-schmooze? Of course. But, in the world of EU politics, it is progress of a kind. Imagine, say, Jacques Santer or Jacques Delors steeling himself to praise an avowedly Eurosceptic British magazine. English may be the fourth language of José Manuel Barroso, the former Portuguese prime minister, but he has evidently put it to good use.

So before we can get started on British outrage over federalism, the EU constitution and qualified majority voting, the 50-year-old Commission president is recalling The Spectator subscription he maintained as Portugal’s foreign minister in the early 1990s.

Bazza — as his British fans in Brussels call him — reminisces about reading Taki, and explains the walk-on role he played in a ‘Dear Mary’ inquiry, dating back to a 1992 flight he took to Africa with the then foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, and the foreign minister of Denmark.