Britain’s new Europe minister says ex-prime minister’s candidacy would have full backing of British government
Tony Blair is a contender to become the first president of the EU with the full backing of the British government, the new Europe minister said today.
Glenys Kinnock, in Strasbourg for the opening session of the new European parliament, said that although the former prime minister had not formally declared his candidacy, it was “certainly” the government position to support him.
“I am sure they would not do it without asking him,” Lady Kinnock said. “The UK government is supporting Tony Blair’s candidature for president of the council.”
The new post is to be created under the Lisbon treaty, which will streamline the way the EU is run if it is endorsed in an Irish referendum in early October.
Blair would be the first sitting president of the EU, who will be appointed by European government chiefs for a minimum of 30 months and a maximum of five years.
If the Irish back the treaty on 2 October, EU leaders are expected to decide on who will get the presidency at a summit at the end of that month.
“Blair is seen by many as someone who has the strength of character, the stature,” Kinnock said.
“People know who he is, and he would be someone who would have this role and step into it with a lot of respect and I think would be generally welcomed.”
While Blair has declined to declare himself as a candidate before the outcome of the Irish referendum, Kinnock’s remarks were the first solid confirmation that he is to run for the job.
However, British diplomats said her comments remained speculation for the moment because the Irish could yet vote down the treaty – as they did in their first referendum last year.
“The reality is Lisbon has not entered into force,” one diplomat said. “Blair has yet to say whether he will stand.”
A spokesman for the ex-PM said: “The job doesn’t exist, so there is nothing to be a candidate for.”
If he stands for the post, the founder of New Labour could yet in to stiff opposition in Europe.
Fredrik Reinfeldt, the Swedish prime minister – who took over the rotating presidency of the EU this month and will chair the October summit – is known to be strongly opposed to a Blair presidency.
Reinfeldt told the Guardian he would not get into any discussion about names for the post, while a senior European diplomat said the presidency would be “the absolute top subject” at the October summit.
Reinfeldt said he expected to oversee the launch of the Lisbon treaty, “including the elected council chairman [Europe president]“.
He added that if the treaty was ratified by all member states, he expected “very many names” to be put forward for the presidency.
José Luis RodrÃguez Zapatero, the Spanish prime minister, who will succeed to the EU presidency after Reinfeldt in January, is also an opponent of Blair.
France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, an early fan of the idea of President Blair, appears now to have turned lukewarm.
William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary, said the creation of a new EU president “could be enormously damaging for Europe”.
“Any holder is likely to try to centralise power for themselves in Brussels and dominate national foreign policies,” he said.
“In the hands of an operator as ambitious as Tony Blair, that is a near certainty. He should be let nowhere near the job.
“It shows what a grip Lord Mandelson now has over Gordon Brown that he has been forced to support his bitterest rival.”
I apologise for Berlusconi
I’m sorry for our prime minister’s predictable reaction to a story about G8 summit preparations, please keep the spotlight on Italy
As a member of the Italian parliament and former magistrate who ensured that many corrupt politicians and businessmen were brought to justice in the 1990s, I wish to apologise to the editor and staff of the Guardian newspaper for the utterly predictable reaction of prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and our foreign minister, Franco Frattini.
The Guardian does its best to keep the public informed. In Italy this government is not accustomed to free debate, or to hearing the truth being told. While sections of the article dealing with preparations for the G8 summit may be debatable, the rest of it contains little that can be refuted.
However, there is one classification missing from the list in the article, one published by Freedom House, which puts Italy 73rd place for freedom of the press. The real problem in our country is that information is firmly in the grip of one individual, namely our prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi – which must be one of the worst cases of conflict of interest ever recorded in any country in the western world.
Berlusconi’s control over the media is exercised via his ownership of the largest Italian publishing house, Mondadori, as well as via the country’s six television networks: three private Mediaset channels owned by Berlusconi himself and three channels of the public broadcaster RAI which Berlusconi indirectly controls and influences, with very rare exceptions I might add, through managerial staff appointments.
His virtually total control of the media allows him to maintain a dominant position and provides an endless source of revenue that helps to consolidate his position within the institutions via a wide-ranging system of patronage. In the past, these revenues were made possible by the tacit approval of previous governments that refused to address the issue of obvious conflicts of interest. Currently Berlusconi pays the Italian government a mere 1% of turnover in return for the television broadcasting frequencies conceded to him and now used for Mediaset transmissions. Since the centre-right coalition government came to power, a number of major parastatal companies have diverted their advertising expenditure from the RAI public television networks to the private networks belonging to the prime minister.
In addition to the media issue, there is now also another, namely the scourge of the “unconstitutional” government reforms. The first of these was a law known as the Alfano bill, which was ordered by Silvio Berlusconi himself as his first act after coming to power, which prohibits the prosecution of himself and the incumbents in three other senior government posts.
The provisions of this law mean Berlusconi did not have to appear in a trial in which he was facing charges of bribing a witness. David Mills, his lawyer and former husband of Blair government minister Tessa Jowell, has been sentenced to four years and six months imprisonment for accepting a bribe. On 6 October, the constitutional court is due to issue a ruling regarding the constitutionality of the Alfano bill and, should the court rule that it is indeed unconstitutional, then Berlusconi will be obliged to stand trial for allegedly bribing Mills.
I would like to conclude by appealing to the Guardian and the other foreign press not to allow the spotlight to move away from Italy and to continue to perform the same vitally important task that they have always performed in the past, namely the task of informing the public, a role that most of our media have abdicated from because they are no longer being allowed to do their job.