THE SILENCE OF THE CUCUMBERS

Rachel Johnson uncovers

a British plot to schmooze the news from Europe

Brussels IT wasn't so very long ago when a story from Brussels meant a certain sort of thing: curly cucumbers, perhaps, or straight bananas or a directive insisting that every motorway bridge in Europe be adorned with a statue of Jacques Delors (I am not making this up). Now, this may be a rash prediction in the wake of Commis- sion President Romano Prodi's credulity- stretching offer of hospitality to Muammar Gaddafi, but, in my view, the curly-cucum- ber genre of reportage belongs firmly in the past. Here's why.

The Commission's elite corps of career civil servants in the porte parole, or spokesman's service, is now a British fief- dom, thanks both to Mr Prodi's reluctance to plant the Commission with Italians, and his yearning to repay the personal debt he owes Europe's most powerful politician, Tony Blair.

Mr Prodi's spokesman is, on paper, the Italian ex-journalist Ricardo 'Ricky' Levi. But the public face of the Commission is the head of the press and communications service, Jonathan Fault. His assistant is Peter Guilford. In the salle de presse, when an internal-market question is raised from the floor, Jonathan Todd is summoned. If it's employment, Andrew Fielding comes on down. Question on reform? Step for- ward, Steve Morris.

So when the accredited press flooded into the Breydel's basement last week to be briefed on the 'big story' of the Prodi presidency so far, the white paper on reform, they heard various Brits explaining why Neil Kinnock is determined to rid the place of its Spanish practices and imbue it with the Anglo-Saxon ideal of civil service excellence and impartiality So it's ciao, then, to a job for life in a Commission hooked on nepotism, the Kin- nock people informed a packed audience of stroppy hacks from the wine-and-olive belt. All hail the whistleblowers' charter, the code of discipline, penalties for profes- sional incompetence, a new career system and a new management policy.

No wonder the non-British press is becoming paranoid that Europe is in the grip of an Anglophone `complot', a fear also expressed by French, Spanish and Ital- ian MEPs in the socialist group of the European Parliament last week. The Com- missioners' personal 'cabinets' are coinci- dentally also packed to the gills with British nationals (there are 17 out of 120 cabinet posts filled by Brits: only Germany, with its tally of 18, has been more successful in colonising Commissioners' private offices).

As Jean Quatremer, a journalist from the French newspaper Liberation, told me, 'Les britanniques are profiting from the weakness of the French and Germans and from tactical errors made at the start of the Prodi term. The Italians didn't under- stand the balance of power in Europe and handed lots of important posts to the British.'

So how is Downing Street making the most of its unprecedented position in the heart of Europe? Well, for a start, it is scheduling regular contacts with the fonc- tionnaires in the spokesman's service, some of whom have been jumping on the Eurostar to attend meetings in the Euro- pean secretariat of the Cabinet Office and the Downing Street press office.

In their briefcases, the fonctionnaires from the supposedly independent execu- tive of the European Union take prepared material in the form of 'scripts', which are taken back to Brussels crisply reorganised into sections entitled 'core points' and 'defensive points' and 'lines to take'. They are being instructed, I am also told, in 'rapid-rebuttal techniques' for breaking stories.

Meanwhile, just before Neil Kinnock presented his livre blanche on Commission reform, he made the now customary pil- grimage to Downing Street to give Mr Blair a preview of his proposals.

Why is No. 10 bothering with the press flaks in the Breydel and taking such a close interest in the pensions and recruitment policies of the EU? It is because if (and there is still an if, as I will explain) London can replace the time-honoured tales of bananas and prawn-cocktail crisps with ones that suggest Britain is leading the way in creating a shiny, model administration in Brussels, then, to put it crudely, Europe may not be the thumping great vote-loser it proved last year for Labour MEPs.

If Mr Blair can put the same gloss on Brussels as he did on the Kosovo crisis (it will be remembered that Alastair Campbell flew repeatedly to Brussels to 'help' Jamie Shea, the Nato spokesman, while Julian Braithwaite was dispatched from the No. 10 press office to Shape), then, as the thinking presumably goes, the British pub- lic can be softened up for a pro-European election campaign from the government.

It would be an exaggeration to say that the Commission has been `Campbellised'. Frankly, the press people here shudder at the suggestion. None of us gets angry phone calls at home (I remember the time I answered the telephone when my hus- band was a lobby correspondent for FT, to hear a voice hissing, 'This is Peter Mandel- son. You can tell your boyfriend that we know what he's done . . . and we will never forget.' Click.) None of us is sworn at during press con- ferences or told in the lobby that what we wrote was 'pathetic garbage'. No one asks what the press can do for them. They ask what they can do for the press. The Finan- cial Times, for example, last week ran a big piece listing not the early achievements of the Prodi presidency (a food agency, the white paper on reform, work on enlarge- ment), but the gaffes.

This being Brussels, however, the Prodi cabinet would not dream of punishing Peter Norman, the FT bureau chief, with the cold shoulder, or make problems over accredita- tion (a trick the White House plays on off- message reporters). They have agonised over his judgments and will bend over back- wards to give him anything he needs in the preparation of subsequent pieces.

When I went to see the fluent and per- suasive Peter Guilford, he would only say that the British government did indeed have much more 'input' now into the Com- mission than it did under Jacques Santer, but it was not, and could never be, the pup- pet-master. 'As Shane Warne would tell you, you can't spin the same ball in 15 dif- ferent directions at the same time.' Only as I left did it occur to me that I was being spun (and that it felt rather nice).

The British are now in a position to con- trol the flow of news out of Brussels. As the Germans straddled industry, and the French bestrode agriculture, so the British can now lay claim to . . . spin. One can see why this Blair triumph is one export he would like to remain invisible.