Relations between the UK and the European Commission have reached a new low, and, as a retired diplomat explains, they are unlikely to improve so long as the President of the Commission remains involved in the discussions

Some ten years after the 1975 referendum that took Britain into Europe, while working as a press spokesman in the Foreign Office, I applied for the job of Head of the European Commission Representation in London, effectively the Commission’s “ambassador” here. When I made my pitch for the job, I put my cards on the table. The Commission was risking alienating the British public, I told my interviewers in Brussels, by its federalist tendencies and its perceived interference in too many aspects of UK life.

To my surprise, given this fairly adversarial presentation, I was offered the job. I was naturally pleased and – no doubt naively – imagined that once in post my views might carry some weight. But the Foreign Office declined to allow me to take up the appointment, so my optimism was never put to the test. It is unlikely I would have made any progress: the President of the Commission at the time was Jacques Delors, whose unabashed federalism – he was father of the euro – was to provoke the famously crass Sun headline, “Up Yours Delors”. While the rest of Europe tended to follow a more centripetal path, in the UK the reaction against the Delors vision gained momentum. Euroscepticism became a growing force in British politics.