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David Cameron is surely right to think that Jean-Claude Juncker is not the man to relieve the European Union’s woes, but I wonder if it is worth a fight. It reminds me of a similar battle by John Major, in 1994, to prevent a fat Belgian called Jean-Luc Dehaene from getting the job, on the grounds that he was too federalist. The post then duly went to Jacques Santer — like M. Juncker, a Luxembourgeois with an alleged fondness for alcohol (he was known as ‘Sancerre’). M. Santer was no better, from the British point of view, than M. Dehaene, and some European diplomatic chips were pointlessly used up. Given Mr Cameron’s stated wish

Tory Eurosceptics from the Cabinet down have long made clear that David Cameron will only be able to get a sufficiently different deal from the EU if he’s prepared to threaten that Britain will leave if it can’t get what it needs. Many have assumed that Cameron, who has been clear that he would prefer Britain to keep in the EU, would not be prepared to do this. But it seems that he is. The German magazine Spiegel reports that Cameron told his fellow EU leaders that if Jean-Claude Juncker, the Luxembourg federalist, became president of the Euroopean Commission he could not guarantee that Britain would stay in the EU.

Tony Blair appeared on the Today programme on Tuesday morning to talk about Europe. The televised version showed him against the backdrop of the Brandenburg Gate. He said somewhat predictable things about Ukip being bad and a reformed Europe being good. The mystery was ‘Why?’ Why was he intervening at this point? It took me several hours to puzzle out a possible answer. It lies, I suggest, in his statement that the European project used to be ‘about peace’ and now it is ‘about power’. He was speaking at the beginning of the week when the contest for the presidency of the European Commission comes to a head. Mr Blair emphasised that

So, now almost all the votes have been counted — except for those in the Islamic Republic of Tower Hamlets, where the vibrant and colourful political practices of Bangladesh continue to keep the returning officers entertained. Allegations of widespread intimidation of voters at polling booths, postal voting fraud and a huge number of mysteriously spoiled ballot papers; so much more fun than the usual dull, grey and mechanistic western electoral procedure. You wonder, looking at the exotic political fervour of Tower Hamlets, how on earth the British people could be so mean-spirited as to have developed this sudden animus against immigration. White British people now make up less than one third

In Brighton in 1996, an insurgent party held its first and as far as I can see only conference. Liberal journalists gazed on the gaudy spectacle with wonder and disdain. We could see that he Referendum Party was a sign of the coming age of the super-rich. It was created by Sir James Goldsmith, a corporate raider who inspired the English tycoon Sir Larry Wildman, in Wall Street, and, you may not be surprised to hear, was a vain and bombastic censor to boot. (He persecuted Private Eye in the courts for not treating him with the deference a mighty plutocrat deserved.) Goldsmith spent most of his time in Mexico

The ‘debate’ about immigration in recent weeks has failed to focus on the crucial issue – the sheer scale that immigration has reached and its inevitable impact on our future. Perhaps this week’s ‘earthquake’ will prepare the ground for a serious discussion of what has to be done while preserving our open society and economy. The fundamental reality is that, under Labour, net foreign immigration was very nearly four million, while one million British citizens emigrated. Of Labour’s four million, only one third were from Eastern Europe, but those are the only ones that they mention. It cannot have escaped their notice that the other two and a half million

I can understand why some of my Conservative colleagues are calling for a pact with Ukip. At varying times over the past few years I have been concerned that our party isn’t doing enough to respond to the electorate’s hunger for an EU referendum, and I agreed that Ukip put necessary pressure on all political parties, and especially on the Conservatives in getting them to commit to a European referendum. However, time has moved on and the Conservative Party—and the country—now has that pledge. This is a time to hold our individual and collective nerve – and not to make knee-jerk decisions while we’re focussed on today’s results and not

Inevitably the lowest attacks have been saved until the week of the election. For months now the neat drip-feeding of anti-UKIP stories from Conservative Campaign Headquarters direct to the UK press has done everything possible to depict UKIP as a racist, xenophobic, bigoted party. This has been significantly ratcheted up ahead of Thursday’s vote. Today’s pages include the Times repeating a story from last year in the hope of successful guilt-by-association. The story is that Geert Wilders (the ‘Dutch Xenophobe’ as the Times headlines him) would like Nigel Farage to join him and Marine Le Pen in an anti-EU Brussels voting bloc. What neither the Times nor any other newspaper wishes

In the lead up to next week’s European elections, voters seem to be disenchanted with the European Union. Around a quarter of the seats in the European parliament are expected to go to anti-EU or protest parties – almost double the proportion those groups won in the last elections five years ago. Ukip is in the lead in the UK and nearly a third of Britons support Nigel Farage and his campaign to take power away from Brussels. When the European project first got going in the early 1950s, sceptics had concerns about sovereignty – but the combination of economic enticements with the objective of preventing war in Europe meant