CITY AND SUBURBAN
Setting off on the Grand Tour with a Eurodoggle for all seasons
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
Iam looking for an award to offer for the Eurodoggle of the year. What should it be? A mint-new European Currency Unit? The memoirs and menus of Lord Jenkins of Hillhead? Perhaps just a Membership of the European Parliament? (That cannot be difficult to get, and you could bank the salary and live on the expenses.) Whatever it is, Jacques Delors must now have claims to it, but my quest began, improbably enough, in the pages of Country Life. I turn first to Pat Cutter's magisterial bridge column. Opposite, inside the back cover, is a full-page advertisement in colour — Purple and yellow, mostly. It shows an outline of the European Community coun- tries, which seem to have swallowed Switzerland. It is headed 'Europe for all seasons', and it urges us to travel to these countries in the off season for low prices, traditional culture, and a warm welcome from our EC partners. It reads, not surpri- singly, as though it has been drafted by a committee. At its foot, marked 'ask advice of these offices', is a list of national tourist boards — 12, including the British Tourist Authority, whose baby this certainly is not. The advertisement, so it says, has been Placed by the Tourism Service of the Community, and is appearing simul- taneously in all 12 countries. Perhaps it will read better in Portuguese or Greek. The EC has a budget of a million ecus (about £600,000) for the campaign, as a precursor for 1990, which Brussels has decreed to be European Tourism Year. This is meant to foster greater understanding of lifestyles and cultures in good time for 1992 and the single market, and the budget for this is £3 million. I will bet an ecu to a hot cross bun that these budgets are left miles behind. They do not include the grants, which, of course, are to be agreed later. As for the advertising, it is absurd to imagine that a Professionally managed and effective cam- paign spreading from end to end of the Community could be mounted for £50,000 a country. The whole sequence of events bears the signs of a boondoggle, which is What the Americans call a factitious project dreamed up by those who wish to benefit from it. What we have here is a Eurodog- gle. I suppose there was bound to be a Tourism Service somewhere down a Brus- sels corridor, working towards harmonisa- tion of the Eurotouring experience, in such time as it can spare from long fact-finding missions to Cannes, Venice, Puerto Banus and Acapulco (for comparison). Its first mistake may have been to admit its exist- ence. I provisionally award it a signed portrait photograph of Sir Leon Brittan.
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