The Spectator’s Notes | 4 June 2005

I wish I could share the widespread joy at the great European ‘No’. Yes, the word ‘No’ is good. Yes, I feel the normal human pleasure at the discomfiture of the politicians. I have enjoyed seeing Peter Mandelson trying to worm round the result and Neil Kinnock raging against his former friends on the French Left and Jean-Luc Dehaene telling France that it, not the EU, now has the problem, and the outside broadcast team sabotaging John Major, sounding like a Dalek on Valium, as he tries to tell us all over again about his wonderful ‘opt-out’ and the importance of ‘variable geometry’. But I fear there is very little chance of any serious break with the European ideal that has dominated Continental politics since the Fifties. This is because it retains complete control of the relevant institutions. The Commission, with its power to frame legislation, is an unanswerable bureaucracy.