You know something is wrong when John Redwood, Boris Johnson, the Murdoch press and the Mail are calling it a triumph.

Even on its own terms the December EU summit plumbs new depths of government mendacity and incompetence. Even if one accepts that the aims of Cameron were legitimate – sheltering the financial sector which finances his party, or defending the single market, he came home less than empty-handed.

By forfeiting the right to negotiate an EU Treaty at the very outset, the government ensured that the summit was a quadruple failure for Britain.

First we will have no influence on the final form and content of the new intergovernmental treaty; if the UK had stayed in it could at every stage have fought its corner, paragraph by paragraph.

Second, we have achieved an isolation so melancholic that even our most traditional ‘friends’ like the eurosceptic Czechs and the hard-right Hungarians have abandoned us.

Third, even our established reputation for diplomatic competence is undermined by the crass failure to prepare the ground, by springing a text on the institutions and the other member states at the last moment, and by rejecting out of hand the procedural compromise offered by European Council President Van Rompuy.

Fourth it confirms the message to the Americans and others that doing business with Europe means working with Berlin, Paris and Brussels, not London. The business community may well draw the same lesson.

Cameron’s excuse that we reacted late because the Franco-German proposals were only tabled earlier in the week is doubly lame; a serious government might well have thought it best to take an initiative earlier rather than just reacting to proposals from others; and it has been clear for two months at least that some form of Treaty change was going to dominate this summit’s agenda.

As to our special pleading for the banks, financial services, hedge funds etc., nothing has changed. EU financial regulation is and will continue to be decided by qualified majority. There was no veto on that; there will be no veto- quite rightly because financial services regulation is part and parcel of internal market rules.

The only thing that changes is that the 26 will now develop the habit of working together on the broad range of economic policy, and that the voice of the most economically liberal, free market, high finance-friendly member state will no longer be heard. One would have to be exceptionally naive to imagine that the 26 will refrain from discussions about any aspect of EU economic and social legislation simply out of consideration for a government that has of its own free will boycotted their meetings. More >

For certain media commentators, self-appointed spokespersons for the market, our friends outside the EU and some ministers in some EU governments who should know better, the debt crisis currently engulfing the eurozone has an easy solution. The European Central Bank should just step up to the plate and guarantee the solvency of the euroland member states.

In this black-and-white version of the world, Germany is the obstacle, haunted by its fears of returning to the hyperinflation of the early 1920s when its national bank just printed those much-photographed cartloads of million deutschmark notes. As the situation deteriorates from difficult to dangerous, the blame game has intensified.

And the culprits are now supposed to be found in the shadowy Frankfurt Group, a sinister secret society whose members happen to be the German Chancellor, the French President (i.e. the democratically elected heads of government of the two largest euroland countries) the President of the ECB, the Presidents of the European Council, the Commission and the Eurogroup, with the occasional participation of the head of the IMF and the Commissioner responsible for economic and monetary policy.

In the current hysteria this ‘Gang of Eight’ is assuming the reins of power in Europe, overthrowing democratic governments and parachuting technocrats in their place (worse still technocrats with European experience) , and imposing the fiat of Brussels in the 17 euro countries. Cooler heads might recognise the value in having regular consultations throughout this crisis with a manageable number of people who will in the end have to propose the solutions; and that this is a sensible if partial response to the much criticised leadership vacuum which has bedevilled the crisis.

And those solutions are not so straightforward. First, conferring on the ECB the role of ‘lender of last resort’ for the Eurozone would almost certainly require a Treaty change; anything less would be challenged in the courts, particularly in Germany. It is true that Germany has a federal structure, a multiparty coalition and an assertive judiciary which makes it impossible for any leader to push through proposals which would not only be politically controversial but also legally questionable.

And it would not just be Germany which would shudder at the thought of an open-ended commitment to other euro countries, now that the costs of servicing their debts have spiralled. So they would seek guarantees that would be tantamount to euro countries losing at least some theoretical national control over domestic spending.

And for this to have credibility it would need the same legal sanctity as that which would authorise the ECB’s new role, namely a Treaty change.

There are some who would relish the thought of a new constitutional process for the EU; certain federalists would see this as the defining moment, to complete business unfinished at Maastricht, Nice, Amsterdam or Lisbon ; others, such as the Council’s former top lawyer, Jean-Claude Piris would want a new Treaty to consecrate the schism between the ins and the outs, a hardcore of the 17 virtuous with the other 10 banished formally to the margins; yet others, like at least some in the main party in the UK coalition would want to seize a chance gifted by heaven to repatriate labour legislation powers and other social dispositions back to member states, or at least to organise new opt-outs.

And these are what are already being talked about; who knows what inventiveness will be shown, and what shopping-lists will be drawn up, once the starting pistol is fired on Treaty change? More >