> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://theroundabout.eu/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Our Man at the Press Club — Issue 3
- URL: https://theroundabout.eu/our-man-at-the-press-club-issue-3/
- Published: 2026-09-30T09:01:14.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-30T09:01:14.000Z
- Author: Aristidis Myrmidon
- Tags: Issue 3, Diary

I watched the Channel incident unfold on my phone on Tuesday afternoon, in a café on the Rue de la Loi, between two meetings I had forgotten the purpose of. It took some time to understand what I was looking at. A man on a speedboat was livestreaming himself pursuing an RNLI lifeboat carrying sixty people who had been at sea since Monday morning, and then, when he got close enough, knifing a dinghy with a rescuer still aboard it. Hampshire Police subsequently arrested six people. The man himself was not among them. He remains at large, presumably preparing his next livestream. The café was full of people having lunch. Nobody else appeared to be watching. I ordered another coffee and tried to remember what my meetings were about. I found, as I sometimes do in Brussels, that the distance between what is happening and what is being discussed is so large that it produces a kind of vertigo. Coffee was the wrong choice.

The Carney speech was still being discussed in the corridors the following week, though the discussion had shifted considerably in register from the standing ovation. The enthusiasm, I was told by someone who attends more Commission briefings than is good for a person, was entirely genuine. The scepticism arrived approximately forty-eight hours later, when people began asking what exactly "associate membership" meant, who had agreed to it, and where in the Treaties it was provided for. The answer to all three questions was the same. Associate membership, it emerged in the days after the speech, was not an EU proposal in the sense that proposals normally emerge from the EU — through consultation, legal review, and the quiet building of consensus among member states. It was a von der Leyen improvisation, delivered during the State of the Union address, which is to say it was announced to the world before it had been agreed with anyone. This is, I was assured by a person who has watched the Commission president for some time, not the first time this has happened. There is a pattern, they said. The headline-grabbing proposal, the standing ovation, the silence that follows when member states are asked whether they were consulted. "The question," this person said, lowering their voice in the way Brussels people do when they are about to say something they consider obvious, "is how long before someone asks how to deal with a Commission president who feels entirely entitled to go rogue." I walked back to the office past the roundabout. The traffic was going in circles. I found this, as I always do, enormously consoling.