Barroso’s lecture and Clegg’s special agent

Apparently Her Majesty’s UK Representative to the EU, Sir Jon Cunliffe, reported a food trolley being sent into the EU Council meeting an hour ago. The plan was supposed to be that the EU leaders would be finished around now but there’s no sign of them yet.

It seems that President Barroso treated everyone inside to a lengthy presentation on the need for jobs and growth. He’s supposed to have pointed out that Britain has the highest absolute number of youth unemployed (at 1.023m) even though as a percentage of the total youth figure it’s much lower than Spain’s infamously high figure (49.6 per cent). At the end of a week in which David Cameron has lectured France (on the madness of the financial transaction tax) and Germany (on its need to lower surpluses) you couldn’t help wondering if that was the most popular moment in the afternoon.

I have a copy of his presentation document that was handed out to EU leaders while he spoke. It ends with the page listing the EU structural funds which he says need to be allocated soon and should be focused on youth unemployment and SMEs. It suggests there is a grand total of 82bn euros to be spent, although some here pour cold water on that figure. I wonder how many leaders are wondering if their long flights in cold air force planes were really worth it.

Not clear at this point whether Herman van Rompuy will succeed in keeping substantial discuussion about Greece largely off the agenda. Rumours of a separate summit for the Eurozone in nine days’ time are presumably aimed at keeping Greece decisions for then and piling pressure on the Greek government.

Callum Miller, Nick Clegg’s private secretary, has been sent along as the DPM’s undercover agent in the PM’s team at this Euro summit. He cycled all the way from the military air strip in sub zero temperatures and has spent the afternoon in heavy disguise listening in on the No 10 team from behind an unfurled newspaper. Actually, I made a bit of that up. But Mr Miller is there to avoid a repeat of the December summit breakdown in communication between PM and DPM and will, presumably, be coming to these events for a while yet.  He has not, I understand, had reason to use the batphone back to DPM command centre on this trip.

At the beginning of the EU council, Herman van Rompuy welcomed Spain’s new Prime Minister (“bienvenido”) to his first EU summit and then tried to welcome Croatia’s new PM but couldn’t remember his name (Croatia is now an accession member and allowed to attend summits as “active observer”). The President of the European Parliament Martin Schulz and another figure sitting between the Croation PM and Mr van Rompuy can see that the EU Council President’s prompt has the wrong name on it. “Wrong one,” one of them says to Mr van Rompuy as he hesitates before pressing a page turn button to give him the right name. Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic looks on unamused.