If you want to understand why Europeans are becoming increasingly exasperated with their governing elite, there’s no better place to start than Louis Michel, the former Belgian foreign minister.

As a member of Belgium’s supremely rotten governing class, Michel could never have been expected to be a shining exemplar of democratic values, but even by Belgium’s rock-bottom standards, Michel is a notably repellent creature. To take a couple of examples, he has attacked holding referendums on European issues unless, um, the right result can be ensured and he has also challenged the right of any one country “to halt the progress of Europe”, whatever that might mean.

Worse still, there was the time he criticized a documentary attacking the genocidal rule of Belgium’s King Leopold in Congo (ten million dead) for having failed to put the slaughter into its proper “historical, intellectual and cultural context.” After those comments, he was a natural for his next descent into the trough, this time as the EU’s development commissioner, and it’s from that position that he has come up with his latest stupidity, the comment that the EU’s civil servants might not assist Tony Blair during the British turn at the EU’s rotating presidency unless it was heading “in the direction of more Europe, and the direction of deeper [integration].”

Michel, like many other Eurocrats, has learned nothing from the non and the nee in France and the Netherlands, nothing at all. He just wants to plough on with the EU ‘project’ regardless of what those pesky voters have to say.

That’s bad enough, but by saying what he has, in the way he has, Michel has made it very clear that he is unlikely to be performing his job correctly in the next six months. If he had any honour, he would resign, but he’s a Belgian politician, so he won’t. Under the circumstances, therefore, he should be fired, and if Blair won’t call for this, then Conservatives, eurosceptics and anyone else in the European ‘parliament’ with a sense of fair play should start the procedure to remove this arrogant, dangerous and profoundly undemocratic bureaucrat.

How about it, Mr Hannan?