In between dodging indictments, Jacques Chirac has made great play of attacking George W. Bush for his supposed arrogance, unilateralism and all-round nastiness. Well, let’s take a look at how Chirac has behaved in pushing the candidacy of slimy Guy Verhofstadt for the presidency of the EU bureaucracy. We needn’t waste too much time discussing Verhofstadt himself. He’s the Belgian prime minister, a job roughly on a par with being emperor of Wyoming. Talentless, sleazy and vain, he’s just the latest nonentity to crawl out of the cesspit that makes up that unfortunate country’s political establishment. But Chirac wanted him installed as the EU’s top bureaucrat, and what Chirac wants, Chirac often gets, and if he doesn’t…

Let the Independent take up the story:

“Another source said of the French President’s stance: “It had overtones of Chirac’s performance when he told the new countries of eastern Europe to shut up over Iraq. He was trying to bully them into dropping their positions. He was accusing small countries that didn’t declare their support for Verhofstadt of moral cowardice.”

Or the Daily Telegraph

“Mr Chirac said it would be better if the EU executive were headed by someone from a country with long experience of the EU and which was a member of all its activities, including the single currency and the Schengen open-border agreement. That ruled out contenders from Britain, Denmark, Ireland, Sweden and all 10 new eastern European member states – most notably Chris Patten, one of Britain’s EU commissioners, who had won last-minute backing from the centre-Right European People’s Party, the biggest group in the European Parliament.”

None of my comments on this issue, of course, should be taken as derogating from my support of the Barnier! campaign for the Commission presidency. Mysteriously, this latter-day Richelieu, this Mazarin, this Talleyrand, was omitted from the Independent’s roll-call of candidates. Just for a moment, why not admit it, I was tempted away from the Barnier! camp by the splendid credentials of Portugal’s Antonio Vitorino (“a Socialist, he is little known outside Brussels and his home country”), but then sanity reasserted itself….

Barnier! Barnier!