Update  it is sobering to see a long line of comments after such an article in a national newspaper, many of them buzzing away about issues far from the immediate points I made. Lots of not altogether focused Euro-scepticism out there. But this one from damage124 caught my amused eye: 

Unless I am very much mistaken, was it not the foreign office that were the big proponents not only of our entry to the EEC but also the euro?
I am sure your description is accurate but perhaps the "blue sky" was actually a very thick fog.
I appreciate that you have now retired but perhaps you should have taken this opportunity to apologise?

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I have been invited to join the lively sophisticated team of Daily Telegraph bloggers. Fame. At last. 

Here is the first result, a gallop over exhausted EU processes which has ideas familiar to attentive readers here but maybe not (yet) to a much wider audience:

Basically, there is the bloke in the bar anywhere in the world, railing against the iniquity of what foreigners get up to: “Can you believe what those Germans/Frenchies/Americans/Arabs/Brits/Jews are doing now?! They’re trying to cheat us! Do they think we’re thick, or wot? Innit!” 

Then above him (sorry, ladies, it’s usually a him) is a vast, unpleasant fog created by supercilious on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand people like me. Officials, technocrats, state-funded busybodies and experts droning on in high acronymic about Targets, Priorities, Road-maps, Objectives, Strategies, Policies and the rest of it.

When you break through that impenetrable, noxious layer of process, you suddenly get to clear blue sky where meetings of world leaders take place. And the impressive thing is that these leaders resemble the bloke in the pub. The language is (usually) not quite as blunt. But the thoughts and messages are…

EU Solidarity of course requires certain minimal levels of discipline and commitment by all sides, lest it become an unacceptable redistributive one-way street, money flowing from those who accept the rules to those who might (or might not) do so.

If richer Europeans ‘should’ help poorer Europeans – as they have massively done through EU Cohesion Funds and other redistributive mechanisms – what ‘should’ the poorer Europeans do in return? Work harder? Agree to refuse assistance when they have improved their lot? Stick to the rules meticulously? Be grateful?

No one has ever wanted to talk about this. Even to broach the subject is a howwid breach of Euro-etiquette, suggesting a narrow, penny-pinching, Thatcherite mistrust of European processes themselves. We’re all Europeans, right? So by definition we are all equally worthy. We can – and must – be trusted!

Should Europeans trust each other? Mais oui. Do they? Not so much…

… For how much longer will Angela Merkel sit there glaring at her fellow leaders and glumly accept that, in effect, Germany is to be blackmailed by smaller, less scrupulous EU partners (“If you don’t give us your nation’s hard-won credibility – and its money – we’ll drag you down too!”)?

Is this acceptable as the basis for running a creditable and credit-worthy society in Germany, and for Germany as part of a wider European community? Is this what all those decades of Germany’s heroic post-WW2 rebuilding effort led to – a Europe of looters and moochers? How to sell that to the honest toiler in the Berlin bierkeller?

Maybe one day soon Germany will look the other shifty countries in the eye round the conference table. And, like Atlas, shrug.

Has last night’s Summit solved the core Eurozone problem?

Of course not. It simply represents a new dizzy height for High Euro-Micawberism:

‘Accidents will occur in the best regulated families…

I have no doubt I shall, please Heaven, begin to be more beforehand with the world, and to live in a perfectly new manner, if -if, in short, anything turns up.’