London Evening Standard, 16th March 2007

From Christopher Fildes column in the London Evening Standard, 16th March 2007:

Mar. 16--Early in Gordon Brown's reign at the Treasury he was inoculated against Chancellor's Itch. This happened when he flew to Hong Kong by way of Luxembourg, Mauritius and Bangkok, meeting other countries' finance ministers at every stopover, and more when he arrived. It put him off them for good.

Other Chancellors have found that foreign travel made a welcome respite from their troubles at home. They itched to get away to the airport, to sit around comparing tactfully translated notes with their opposite numbers in pleasant lo-cations, often with dinner to follow. They even claimed to find it useful.

Not this one. To the meetings of Europe's finance ministers he sends the luckless Dawn Primarolo. When they joined up to lumber him with a withholding tax, he saw them off. In his Budget speeches he inserts a cherished para-graph, explaining how much better our economy is doing than its European partners. He must be redrafting it now for its farewell appearance next week.

It will be supported by his annual tribute to the Bank of England for its skill and judgment. The unspoken subtext will be that the reformed Bank was his creation, that the pound is still its currency and that we are lucky not to have our monetary policy managed for us by the European Central Bank in Frankfurt.

Tony Blair must pretend not to listen. He was and is a natural meeter and greeter who could be said to have the Itch badly. He applied all his arts towards letting the pound reach what he saw as its destiny within Europe's single currency. Time and again he was frustrated -- first of all by the five tests on which the Treasury insisted, and then by the need to call a referendum and the pollsters' obstinate reports that if he did, he would lose.

Now he can see that Europe's current project is not its currency but its constitution. Voted down in France and Hol-land, it has been revived by Angela Merkel in voter-proof form and has found a cheerleader in Guy Verhofstadt, Prime Minister of Belgium and host to the European Commission. If Britain tries to block the constitution, he says, the Euro-pean Union must progress without us.

Lord Blackwell would like to know whether this is a threat or a promise. He is chairman of Global Vision, launched this week to argue that Britain would be well served by a looser relationship with Europe -- holding on to free trade and open markets, but stopping short of political and economic integration and the rules and directives that go with it. We might even recover control of our overseas trade policy, after ceding it to Brussels along with fisheries.

As for our currency, that, of course, is still with us, and so are the international markets which, so we were told, would wither if we did not join the euro. Instead, the pound may live to see the euro out, and that would certainly fit into Blackwell's vision. He was John Major's policy adviser, which cannot recommend him to Gordon Brown, but Europe's finance ministers and their ideas may not recommend themselves either.

Early in his next reign, the new Prime Minister must make choices about Europe. He will have to confront his op-posite numbers and to know his sticking-point. From that point of view, his inoculation against Chancellor's Itch may prove healthy for all of us.