I fear that the Prime Minister was ill-advised to allow his name to be attached to an astonishly bad and strange letter sent to ‘Presidents’ Van Rompuy and Barroso by twelve national EU member state leaders.

Parts of it was written by the EU’s version of our old friend the Postmodernism Bureaucratic Generator, a computer program which assembles plausible sounding jargon words in a more or less random way to produce sentences which have a creepy plausibility but absolutely no meaning:

In this context, we ask the Commission to convene without delay a new forum for the mutual evaluation of national practices to help identify and bring down unjustified regulatory barriers, examine alternatives to regulation which ensure high professional standards and assess the scope for further alignment of standards to facilitate mutual recognition of professional qualifications.

We look forward to the Commission report on the outcome of sectoral performance checks and call on the Commission to fulfil its obligation under the services directive to report comprehensively on efforts to open up services markets and to make recommendations for additional measures, if necessary in legislation, to fulfil the internal market in services

Anyway, I have analysed this ghastly thing over at Telegraph Blogs

First, it is absurdly long. 1656 words. It has succumbed to an acute case of EDDS (European Dustbin Drafting Syndrome), where successive versions of the text get ever more obscure additions as bureaucrats throughout twelve governments press their pet concerns, and no one dares say "Stop!"

Concluding thusly:

Had I been in No 10 I would have advised the Prime Minister not to sign such a text. It wastes time, and (worse) it’s undignified.

Much better that he drop a short private line to Messrs Barroso and Van Rompuy to say that he knows that eleven other leaders are writing this letter, and that he supports the thrust of it: without significant speedy EU-wide steps to promote growth and cut bureaucracy, the crisis will intensify. Who knows, they might even have read it.