Our Man at the Press Club — Issue 1

I was at the press club on Thursday evening — the real one, not the one the lobbyists use, though the distinction is becoming harder to maintain — when someone from the Council secretariat told me that the institutions were back from recess and that everyone was very refreshed and ready to get things done. I had heard this before, in September 2024 and September 2025, and I said so. He agreed that he had said it before. We had another drink. At the next table, a man I recognised from DG TRADE was explaining to a woman I did not recognise that the situation was actually more complex than it appeared. It always is. That is the one thing about Brussels that never changes. The situation is always more complex than it appears, the complexity always resolves into something quite simple, and by the time it does, everyone has moved to a different job.

I had lunch last week with a former Commission official who left in 2023 and now works for a consultancy whose name contains the word "strategic." He ordered the fish. He told me that things inside the Commission were not as bad as people said, that there was genuine talent at the working level, and that the problem was essentially one of political leadership rather than institutional capacity. I have heard this argument many times, from many former Commission officials, at many lunches. It is always delivered with the same air of reluctant candour, as if the speaker is taking a considerable personal risk by sharing it. I nodded and ate my soup. Outside, on the roundabout, the traffic was going in circles. I found this, as I always do, enormously consoling.