Honesty is not a word usually associated with former French president Valery Giscard D’Estaing, but freed from the cares of office and the responsibility of drafting the first attempt at an EU constitution, he’s come up with a few helpful comments on the “new” non-constitution constitution. As the Daily Telegraph reports he’s now saying that differences between the old, dead constitution and its zombie revival “are few and far between and more cosmetic than real”. He’s right. Comments such as these (and Giscard is not the only one to make them) pose an increasing, and real, problem for those politicians, such as Britain’s Gordon Brown trying to wriggle out of their commitments to hold a referendum on any ‘constitution’. Giscard feels that they should keep on wriggling. With Trent Lott-like disdain for the ordinary voter he explains (the Daily Telegraph reports) that “the new treaty mandate, agreed in Brussels last month, is too complicated for ordinary European citizens to understand.” Predictably enough, Jean-Luc Dehaene, the former Belgium prime minister and, like so much of Belgium’s political class, a staunch opponent of democracy, throws in his own two euro-cents: “Europe,” roars this colossus, “will never go forward by referendum…Leading is showing the way, not following.” In other words, Deheane to voters: Drop dead.