PM's rift with Chirac widens over EU plans
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Your support makes all the difference.The gulf between Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac is to widen as France joins forces with Germany to shape the debate over the future of the European Union. Efforts by diplomats to cool a heated row between the leaders at last month's EU summit in Brussels have failed to heal the rift. Although they will see each other at the Nato summit in Prague, which begins tomorrow, a meeting to bury the hatchet is unlikely.
The continuing "froideur," as one Whitehall figure called it, comes amid alarm at the Foreign Office that France and Germany have reforged the close links which have traditionally made them the "engine" which drives the EU. Officials fear the renewed Paris-Bonn axis may leave Mr Blair on the sidelines, jeopardising his strategy of being an influential player on the European stage.
France will seal its new pact with Germany by issuing three joint declarations, on EU co-operation on home affairs and defence and their position on the Convention, chaired by Valery Giscard d'Estaing, drawing up a new blueprint for the way the EU works. There will also be celebrations in January when France and Germany celebrate the 40th anniversary of the treaty which set the seal on postwar reconciliation.
French sources warned Mr Chirac would regard it as a "declaration of war" if Mr Blair continued to demand early common agricultural policy reforms. They dismissed as "factually wrong" his claim that the world's poorest countries would benefit from a CAP shake-up, saying these nations did not pay tariffs on the goods they exported to the EU.
Mr Blair's official spokesman said: "France is a key ally and our relationship is fundamentally strong."
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