Mildly, moistly Thatcherite is what this European Commission would like to be

If you want to discombobulate a Eurocrat, try calling him a Thatcherite. Gert-Jan Koopman, the European Commission’s otherwise articulate director of industrial policy and economic reform, threw up his hands in silent horror when I lobbed the epithet at him, though I meant it as a compliment. The game in Brussels these days — so I learnt from half a dozen conversations within a stone’s throw of the ultimate in glass houses, the Commission’s re-clad Berlaymont headquarters — is to advance a smaller-government, less-red-tape, jobs-and-growth agenda. But in the face of resurgent protectionism in France and elsewhere and the uncertain outcome of the German election, it is a game which requires an element of stealth. Hence the need to look astonished at any accusation of neo-liberalism, or worse.

Worst of all is to be called Thatcherite, which is a codeword in these parts for treating Old Europe’s ‘social model’ with contempt, while refusing point-blank to give up your EU budget rebate.