The Juncker busters bomb

IT SOUNDED almost like an admission of defeat. Faced with a growing likelihood that Jean-Claude Juncker, a former prime minister of Luxembourg, will become the next president of the European Commission, David Cameron said wearily on June 17th: “I will go on thinking it is wrong right up until the end.”

The Conservative prime minister has been fighting a furious campaign to block Mr Juncker, an unrepentant European federalist, who is being foisted on the leaders of the European Union (EU) by its newly elected parliament. Mr Cameron’s Swedish, Dutch and Hungarian counterparts are all opposed to him; Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, whose voice counts for most, is also unconvinced. Yet Mr Juncker is the candidate of her own political group, the European People’s Party. Under increasing pressure at home to arrange his appointment, Mrs Merkel therefore seems, pending some last-ditch change of heart, pretty likely to do so.

Mr Cameron would then be humiliated, which would not augur well for his promise to renegotiate the terms of Britain’s EU membership, before putting it to a referendum in 2017. Conservative Eurosceptics would be enraged. In Mr Juncker, Britain would also have a hostile commission president, a great threat to Mr Cameron’s high-wire renegotiation strategy. In short, the situation, which may be decided at an EU summit in the Belgian town of Ypres next week, is a mess.

To minimise the damage of his expected defeat, Mr Cameron’s advisers are urging him to prepare a “plan B”, consisting of the concessions he would hope to wring from his European counterparts by way of consolation. The most important would be to secure a plum economic portfolio in the carve-up of commission jobs that will follow the president’s appointment. Having control of the important competition, internal market, trade or energy briefs could greatly improve Britain’s chances of reforming the EU in ways that might, among other things, impress British voters. The trouble is, most of the union’s other 27 countries also want those jobs and, whatever sneaking admiration Mr Cameron may have won with his dogged stand against Mr Juncker, he has also caused a lot of bad blood.

His best way to overcome that would be to nominate a commissioner his EU counterparts could live with. The current favourite for the job, which has an annual salary of £200,000 ($340,000), is Andrew Lansley, the leader of the House of Commons and Mr Cameron’s former health secretary. He would be an underwhelming choice. Mr Lansley has done little work in Europe, is a poor communicator and, as the prime minister’s former boss, would be the latest in a line of friends of Mr Cameron to be rewarded with important posts. A better choice would be David Willetts, the Conservative universities minister, who is currently among the outsiders. An undemonstrative and clever centrist—his nickname is “Two Brains”—Mr Willetts is a rare Tory politician with good European knowledge. He is fluent in German, speaks halfway decent French, and is a regular visitor to European conferences. Nominating him could help soothe Mr Cameron’s ruffled counterparts.

Not that that is currently the prime minister’s priority. Indignant, self-righteous and, on this issue, as it happens, right, Mr Cameron appears resolved to resist Mr Juncker to the bitter last. It is magnificent diplomacy, but possibly madness.