The height of hypocrisy

The Sunday papers are full of sanctimonious twaddle about the choice of the Belgian prime minister and Baroness Ashton for the two top European jobs, heaping blame on Gordon Brown for failing to do something or other that is not entirely clear, given that Britain still won one of the top jobs despite their unpatriotic efforts effectively to promote Benelux federalists over the outstanding British leader of recent times. Has there ever been a clearer example of people ignoring the consequences of their own position? Given that these newspapers - shamefully abetted by the Conservative front bench - actively campaigned against the one British figure who could have brought real relevance to the Presidency of the EU, isn't a morning of silent embarrassment the least we could expect in atonement for own culpability in the outcome?

Dave's Euro man wants Euro-taxes

With William Hague telling Euro-leaders not to back Tony Blair for the Presidency of Europe, it is instructive to read the considered thoughts of his most serious rival, Herman Van Rompuy, who one assumes to be David Cameron's preferred candidate in the absence of any loony right-wingers from Eastern Europe in the running. According to today's Times, Dave's man wants to see new European taxes. It is no wonder that the well-informed Ben Brogan is urging a small wager on Tony Blair winning through. With 4/1 available at Paddy Power, it doesn't sound like bad advice.

The simple fact is that the Tories' approach to the European Parliament is quite mad

Iain Dale is demanding that those who criticise the Polish MEP Michal Kaminski should apologise because the Chief Rabbi of Poland has been prevailed upon to say that the man is not an anti-semite these days and to criticise a headline run by the New Statesman suggesting he was asking the UK Tories to ditch their alliance with him.

Yet, as Toby Helm points out, Rabbi Schudrich said in an email to the New Statesman that he has not retracted:

"It is clear that Mr Kaminski was a member of the NOP, a group that is openly far-right and neo-Nazi...Anyone who would want to align himself with a person who was an active member of NOP and the Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne, which was established to deny historical facts of the massacre ... needs to understand with what, and by whom, he is being represented."

Moreover, Helm explains that the new comments come as a result of 'enormous pressure ' - bullying in plain terms - from Kaminski's Law and Justice Party to retract, but he has not done so. As Helm says:

I suspect that if one really wants to get to the heart of what Schudrich thinks, one should stick to the statement he originally gave to the New Statesman, before the row really got going. Cut through the political mud-slinging, go back to the time when he gave an opinion under no pressure at all. Then he raised questions about Kaminski's past association with a neo-Nazi leaning party, and said people needed to think clearly before getting alongside such individuals. The Tories want to portray Schudrich as a great supporter of Kaminski because they are in a mess over their new EU allies. The truth, I reckon, is rather more complex and less helpful to David Cameron's party.

However much the defenders of Cameron's mad Euro-policy may grumble, the simple fact is this: at a time when the Tories could (and if they were rational, should) have continued in the EPP, the party of Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, they instead chose to ally themselves with a motley crew of fringe parties and MEPs well outside even the right-wing mainstream. They did this purely to satisfy a bunch of Eurosceptic fanatics who had backed Cameron as leader. And they were quite happy to ditch their own respected leader at Strasbourg in the process, preferring to see Kaminski as their leader.

That some of their new allies have pretty unsavoury pasts (to quote Rabbi Schudrich "Mr Kaminski was a member of the NOP, a group that is openly far-right and neo-Nazi") adds to the oddity of it all. And no amount of huffing and puffing can detract from the sheer idiocy of such positioning, both for the Conservatives and for a Britain they hope to govern again.

Hague shows his immaturity in Europe

It is quite extraordinary that William Hague is going around Europe bad-mouthing our former Prime Minister in a bid to scupper his chances of becoming European President. At the same time, despite the growing criticism at home and abroad, he remains doggedly wedded to his bizarre allies in Eastern Europe and further away from ever than the Christian Democrat mainstream in the European Parliament.

The more the facts show the extremism of Kaminski or the Latvian Fatherland party, the more those who raise them find themselves smeared and attacked. No wonder an experienced hand like Michael Heseltine has warned that they will have to be ditched pronto if the Tories win power.

The idea that a would-be future foreign secretary is leading campaign on behalf of the Luxembourg prime minister ahead of one of our greatest British prime ministers suggests a startling immaturity. We are not talking Nigel Farage or Nick Griffin here, after all, but someone aspiring to a great office of state. Yet Hague puts narrow Tory sectarianism first.

I had thought that Hague had become one of the more substantial figures on David Cameron's front bench. But his antics in recent months have shown how wrong I was. He is wholly lacking in the judgment required for the job, and prone to act in ways that are utterly at odds with the British national interest. It is no wonder that so many in the US and Europe are so bemused.

Germans and Irish give Cameron a conference headache

In a week which started with the re-election of a conservative giant, Angela Merkel, and which seems set to finish with a Yes vote in the Irish Lisbon Treaty referendum, David Cameron's Conservatives will go into their party conference with their European policy in tatters.

The re-election of a leading Christian Democrat like Angela Merkel ought to have been a cause for celebration for the Conservatives. Instead, having exiled their own moderates, they are stuck in the European Parliament with a ragbag of Nazi-commemorating Latvians and Polish homophobes, trying to discover the cigarette paper that separates them from the golfclub bores of UKIP.

Meanwhile, assisted by a mad combination of Nigel Farage, Sinn Fein and far-right anti-abortionists, Ireland looks likely to vote Yes to Europe. As Peter Preston pointed out yesterday, Euroscepticism is not the default position in the Republic, and last year's No vote reflected a combination of misinformation by No campaigners and poor presentation by the Yes side.

All of which threatens to expose the loopiness of Cameron's position just as he starts his party conference. He can no longer go on wishing that the Treaty will fall - the likelihood is that the Czechs will sign by Christmas. As David Aaronovitch says this morning, the German courts have already somehow failed to live up to their allotted role in this regard.

So, can we now look forward to a revival of John Major's greatest hits as Cameron and William Hague have to explain how they will de-ratify a Treaty that has been ratified - or, more likely, explain to the wide-eyed Europhobes who have been holding their tongue until now that the game is up? I do hope Kenneth Clarke is around to help explain it all to us next week.

Cameron's Anti-Semitic European leader

The total disinterest in European politics in this country means that there has been virtually no scrutiny of the new odds and sods group to which the Tories now belong in the European parliament. But the Observer today reveals more about the mindset of the Michal Kaminski, the man chosen by David Cameron to be its leader.

Over recent years a series of investigations have shown that Polish residents of Jedwabne, along with some German troops, rounded up the Jewish population in July 1941 and herded them into a barn which was set on fire. At a ceremony in Jedwabne on 10 July 2001, the then president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, called for the country to confront its past and apologised. But many in Jedwabne opposed the ceremony and apology, claiming that the Germans were mainly to blame and that Poland should not say sorry because Polish Jews had "collaborated" with the Soviet occupiers. An article in the far-right Polish newspaper Nasza Polska on 20 March 2001 quoted Kaminski as saying: "Maybe they try to suppress their own guilty conscience, those Jews who did a lot of harm to Poland during the Soviet occupation and during communism."

Kaminski denies making the comments though respected Polish newspapers report that he was part of this campaign. Either way, Rabbi Marcus is surely right to demand that Cameron dissociates himself from these views.

Why are the Tories descending into partisan pettiness?

A couple of years ago, David Cameron was keen to stress the all-embracing nature of the new Conservatives. They were nothing less than the new Blairites, he trilled, though not all of us were convinced.

But the message was clear: the partisan nastiness so aptly identified by Theresa May in her evocation of the 'nasty party' was a thing of the past. Voters who had shifted to Labour could turn to the new cuddly Tories safe in the knowledge that they had the national interest, rather than the partisan concerns of a minority of right wing obsessives, at heart.

Of course, in getting elected, David Cameron had to throw a few crumbs to the obsessives, pledging to abandon the European Christian Democrats in favour of a barmy alliance of fringe parties cobbled together among the also-rans of Europe. Nobody believed he really meant it. And then it came to pass. The Tories now sit with the Latvian Waffen SS memorial party, while decent middle of the roaders like Edward McMillan Scott are booted out.

And when there is a real chance that one of the greatest British politicians of our age could become the President of Europe, what is the considered response of the man who would be Cameron's Foreign Secretary? "He should be let nowhere near the job," he says, using the sort of diplomatic skills normally apparent in UKIP.

Tony Blair often put the national interest above partisan interests, appointing able Tories like Chris Patten to key posts in Northern Ireland, for example. Is it really too much to expect David Cameron to do the same?

Dave's dodgy Euro-allies

I'm pleased that John Bercow was elected Speaker, though the mutterings from the Tory backwoodsmen about deposing him suggest that Cameron's efforts to modernise his party have not permeated very far into the party's psyche.

And that wasn't the only indicator. For yesterday was also the day that the Tories unveiled their 'odds and sods' European party. Instead of joining mainstream conservative opinion in the EPP - where Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy sit their parties - David Cameron has proceeded with his mad collection of Latvian Nazi enthusiasts, Polish gaybashers and Czech doubters of climate change.

I agree with Alastair Campbell that this event has the more long-term significance. The BBC extraordinarily sought to portray this motley crew as being on the centre right on politics. They ignored the eccentricity and extremism of his new allies, surely something that would have merited attention in other circumstances and pretended that this madcap group will actually have any influence in the European parliament.

Given that Libertas, the party that sought to make Euro-scepticism a European force suffered a spectacular failure in the European elections and has collapsed into farce, and that Ireland is now set to accept Lisbon by a 2-1 majority, the spectacular stupidity of the Tories' stance will become the more pronounced.

Europe is going to become more integrated whatever David Cameron says. The issue is how it does so and in what areas. Throwing a hissy fit against the EPP in order to join forces with the Latvian Waffen SS commemoration committee is hardly the best way to exercise that leverage should Cameron occupy No 10 in the future.

The cracks are showing in Cameron's modernisation makeover

This week has been a salutary one for those in the commentariat who believe that ex-PR man David Cameron has modernised the Tory party, and brought it to the moderate centre. First, we had had the extraordinary story of Derek Conway and has family job-creation scheme, a classic example of the arrogance that so characterised the Tories in power and which led to their 1997 defeat; and taking £25,000 a year from the taxpayer to pay one's student son for not working is of an entirely different order to the late declaration of donations. Now, we have the MEP Daniel Hannan taking to the extreme the Europhobic tendencies that were limited to the 'bastards' under John Major, but which are now part of the party's mainstream, by comparing the German President's powers to those of Hitler in 1933. There are, to be fair, some serious modernisers in Cameron's shadow cabinet, but his makeover has not reached the wider party (as any conversation with local councillors or members aptly shows), and Hannan has simply given voice to their obsessive paranoia. Perhaps Cameron's failure to achieve decisive polling leads shows that voters already recognise that reality.

Boycotting Mugabe is right

Gordon Brown is absolutely right to boycott the Lisbon summit over the European Union's disgraceful decision to invite Robert Mugabe. If the EU were really serious about African development, they would not invite the demagogue whose policies have turned what was once the bread-basket of Africa into its basket-case, and whose contribution to any discussion about Africa's future must be worse than useless. Bronwen Maddox put the case well in this morning's Times. Instead of making fatuous comments, the EU President, Jose Manuel Barroso should take responsibility for ensuring that when the EU introduces sanctions, they are upheld. It is good to see the Czechs upholding EU values too - they know enough about appeasement having experienced it in 1938 and 1968: it is somewhat dispiriting that nobody else could bring themselves to do so too.