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- guardian.co.uk, Monday 7 May 2001 01.32 BST
But there is a view in Brussels that Blair has been too obsessively anxious about avoiding European minefields on the road to a second term. Leaving aside the smouldering question of the single currency, his path is clear. Tory central office has been planting lots of red warning flags, sending the shadow cabinet office minister, Andrew Lansley, over on the Eurostar to mark out the dangers. It wasn't very convincing, especially when he talked, though with an impressively straight face, about how William Hague and Francis Maude would be taking a robust Conservative message to the Gothenburg summit in mid-June - just days after their certain triumph at the polls.
Yet real hazards await after the election, especially if the great debate about the future of Europe gets caught up with a euro referendum. It's going to be hard enough to win that argument without getting tangled up in Heath Robinson complexities about the role of council, commission, a second parliamentary chamber, a charter of competences and budgetary powers. When eyes glaze over, those are the kind of Euro-words that do it.
And there are immediate dangers for Blair when the integrationist Belgians take over the EU's rotating presidency in July, with ideas like union-wide taxes and a stronger euro-group (the forum of 12 euro-zone finance minsters), where Gordon Brown - nothing personal, you understand - cannot be welcome.
The Belgians, incidentally, hailed Schröder's thoughts, but disliked those bits that called for some EU powers to repatriated - which went largely unmentioned in the usual "superstate" frenzy in the UK. The French loathed the lot. Hitman Pierre Moscovici, the Keith Vaz of the Quai d'Orsay, was wheeled out to rubbish them, boosting British hopes that talk of the revival of the Franco-German partnership after last December's bust-up at Nice had been exaggerated.
• The Swedes notched up a couple of successes for their presidency last week, when the prime minister, Goran Persson, managed to get North Korea's Kim Jong-il to loosen up, and pushed through a long-awaited EU deal on the sort of freedom of information rules that Scandinavians take for granted.
But they've had a hard time. Their Stockholm summit was a yawn and it was plain rude of the Belgians to launch their own 16-point plan a full two months early. And the Swedes are now seriously worried about how to manage the presence of George Bush at Gothenburg. Inviting him over seemed like a good idea, but with controversy raging over the Son of Star Wars missile defence scheme and the Kyoto global warming pact in shreds, what was planned as a showcase for transatlantic partnership could become a launching pad for embarrassingly public trouble with the Toxic Texan.
• I hadn't realised this before, but Her Majesty now has no fewer than four ambassadors in Brussels, which must say something about the sheer intensity of British engagement at the heart of Europe. Cognoscenti will work out easily that the EU certainly needs one of our top chaps, as does Nato, and of course Belgium.
Resisting the urge to launch a helpfully educational euro-quiz, I can reveal that the latest addition to the team is an affable and thoughtful diplomat who represents HMG on the new political and security committee, a key point in the spaghetti junction of institutions where - with or without Britain's great debate - governments are quietly, and routinely, starting to make foreign and security policy happen in Europe's name.
• Romano Prodi and team were dismayed to learn from the latest "Eurobarometer" poll that a third of European citizens believe most of the EU's budget is spent on buildings, salaries and perks. The drearier truth is that these add up to about 5% and that the vast bulk goes on the common agricultural policy and regional aid.
No one wants to be caricatured and disliked. But shouldn't the Eurocrats have been more concerned by the finding that enlargement -the single biggest project facing the union today - is deeply unpopular, with 50% against it in some countries?
On second thoughts, maybe the commission was right to challenge governments: if they dream up these big and costly ideas, they really must try harder to sell them to their voters.
