To the Council’s Budgets Committee this afternoon to present and defend the Committee’s draft 2011 budget. It’s a difficult exercise for us. On what basis should we budget for officials’ salaries, for example? A Court ruling will determine whether or not the Council’s decision was correct. If it rules that it wasn’t, then back payments will have to be made. The payment of salaries is a legal obligation, not a matter of choice, so should we budget for such back payments in case? And what about the implementation of the Lisbon Treaty? We have tabled an amending budget for 2010 (as has the European Parliament and the Committee of Regions), but the budgetary authority has not yet taken any decision on this. We must be consistent with ourselves and assume that we will get all that we requested and budget for 2011 on that basis, but it means that there are, abnormally, two large elements of conditionality in the overall exercise. But over and beyond the technical discussions about what we should and what we must do, there is, to my mind, a worrying gap between the political and the administrative. Today’s exercise was administrative – a Secretary General and his staff in discussion with officials from Treasuries and permanent representations. But where are the political discussions? The answer is that there are none, and under the Lisbon Treaty’s new procedure the nearest smaller institutions will now get to the conciliation procedure that has replaced the old second reading stage is the right to submit their views in writing. As I told the delegations, this is like the concept in political science of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, my President and political authorities are being urged by the likes of Buzek, Durant, Roubek, Barroso, Sefcovic, Reding, Van Rompuy and the Spanish Presidency (to mention just a few of our most recent visitors) to do more, particularly in the context of participatory democracy. On the other hand, the delegates to the budgets committee are telling me that we should spend less. OK, doing more doesn’t necessarily mean spending more. But our Committee has already made serious efforts to economise and redeploy existing resources and we already achieve synergies with other institutions wherever these are possible. That leaves us with two choices: do less (surely the opposite of the spirit of the Lisbon Treaty), or lower the quality of our work. As I wrote above, it’s a difficult exercise for us!

The members of the European Economic and Social Committee are appointed for a mandate (previously of four years and now, under the new Treaty, of five years). Technically-speaking, it is the Council (Article 302) that adopts ‘the list of members drawn up in accordance with the proposals made by each Member State’  but, as that language implies, the proposals made by each government are rarely, if ever, questioned. The next mandate of the Committee starts this October, and the Council has set 31 May as the indicative deadline for the Member States’ proposals. So far, we are aware of two country lists. In one case, ‘turnover’ will be just 8%. In the other, turnover will be 78%! Renewal is always a big challenge for the administration. New members have to be smoothly inducted and shown the ropes in such a way that the Committee can continue to function optimally. And, in terms of the basic relationship between membership and administration, we will never get a second chance to make a first impression. The administration has therefore been very hard at work, preparing for the renewal period and process. Last Wednesday I chaired the fourth meeting of our renewal task force. It was a dream of a meeting and left me feeling immensely proud and satisfied; it was so well prepared and productive. The overall vision is of a ‘one stop shop’. We may not have the resources of a European Parliament but we do have resourcefulness in great and creative quantities.

Now that a couple of weeks have gone by I can be a little more forthcoming publicly about the appointments made by the Committee’s Bureau two weeks ago. In fact, the Bureau appointed two new directors; one for General Affairs and one for Human Resources. As a consequence, the previous Director for General Affairs, Nikos Alexopoulos, will now become Deputy Secretary General. It has taken a long time to get here – my proposal for the new establishment plan for the Committee’s administration was approved by the Bureau all the way back in December 2008 – but we are now definitely here and I confess to a slight sense of elation because at long last I will now have just one job, the only one I was actually appointed to do – that is, Secretary General. Until July 2009, when a Director of Finance was appointed, I actually had three jobs (SG, acting Director, Finance, and acting Director, Human Resources) and since then I have had two jobs (SG and HR). Now, at long last, I can start to concentrate more on longer-term and strategic issues.

This evening, on my way to my writers’ circle meeting, I saw something most extraordinary and also extremely frightening. It was in a narrow street with tall town houses behind the Place Fernand Coq in Ixelles. A first floor window was wide open and in it was a girl – about ten years old, I’d say – on a swing. As she swung back, into the room behind her, she was safe. But as she swung forward, out of the window, she was about ten metres above the street below. I did not imagine this. I was with a reliable witness, a colleague. We didn’t know what to do. If we had cried out she might have been startled or looked down and lost her balance. But who in their right minds could have set up such a swing in such a dangerous way, for it cannot have been the girl herself?

Although largely overlooked by the continental media, another set of elections were going on in the United Kingdom on Thursday. These were the local elections for some 164 local councils. At the moment, with 158 of the results in, Labour has gained 420 councillors and 15 councils, the Conservatives have lost 123 councillors and 8 councils, and the Liberal Democrats have lost 144 councillors and 4 councils. Confused? The explanation, at least in part, is that Labour was starting from such a poor result at the previous local elections and so a swing back up was only to be expected. But this set of results surely further blurs the message that the British electorate may, or may not, have wished to give to its political parties.

We watched A Streetcar Named Desire this evening. It is extraordinary to think that the film is almost sixty years old, but the stellar performances of a then relatively unknown Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh (fresh from Gone with the Wind) have lost none of their power. The producers had to struggle with some of the awkward themes from Tennessee Williams’s play – homosexuality and rape in particular – but the resulting subtleties contrast even more effectively with the brutal animality of Brando’s Stanley Kowalski.  The real star of the show was the playwright himself, entering a prolific period that would produce such masterpieces as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. I couldn’t help but wonder how much of his poor sister, Rose (a beautiful schizophrenic who was institutionalised for much of her adult life), we were seeing in the character of Blanche Du Bois…

My 20 k coach

Theoretically, I am in training for the 20 k, so this morning the dog took me for a +/- 10 k run in the Forêt de Soignes. It’s a circuit around the lakes at Tervuren that all joggers will know well. The dog runs (just slightly) faster than me. He also has a habit of stopping to sniff interesting things. So I let him off the lead. I can do this with confidence because when he was young we spent about twenty-four consecutive Saturday mornings training him at a special school. In other words, although he is not attached, he is under control. Towards the end of the run, just near the summer palace and the boat house, I was stopped by a man on a bike. ‘Flemish, French, German, English?’ he asked, most politely. Then he explained that under the law he should give me a massive fine because my dog was off the lead in the forest. ‘I know,’ he continued, seeing my miffed expression, ‘I can see that your dog is well trained and it’s true that there are no young animals around here but, nevertheless, the law is the law and I have to apply it across the board.’ I tried to make a defence for myself. ‘I thought I’d be all right if I stuck to the roads.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘There are signs,’ he said. ‘Well, I didn’t see any,’ I replied. He shook his head even more sadly. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘The signs are in the wrong places or non-existent. But rule number one of the law is that if you enter the forest you should be aware of the law and the law says dogs should be on their leads at all times.’ He gave me a solemn warning and let me go. Now, I cannot complain about this chap. He wasn’t bumptious or officious. He was fluently polite in four languages. He wasn’t in the slightest bit aggressive, and he was understanding. Moreover, the Forêt de Soignes has in the past been plagued by packs of stray dogs and there have been horror stories about baby deer dying. But that sort of thing happens deep in the forest and not on the paths where I run. The only animals you see where I run are … Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs! (See 17 April post)

The volunteers just before the doors opened...

Today, Saturday, 8th May, was Open Doors Day in the EU institutions and the European Economic and Social Committee took its proud place alongside the other institutions in the European quarter in throwing open its doors and warmly welcoming in European citizens. We started at nine with a coordination meeting. The doors opened at 10.00 and the traffic of curious visitors steadily grew throughout the day. As ‘Captain of the Ship’ (well, first mate) I was there from beginning to end and I am immensely proud and happy about the way the event went. No less than twenty-one of our members participated, some coming from far away (Greece, Malta…). Sixty-one officials, all volunteers, worked throughout the day, manning stalls, showing visitors around, answering questions, supervising and, more generally, welcoming our visitors – and by close of play at 18.00 there had been around 4,500 of them. A fun day – and a tiring one.

This evening we watched the film, The Road, with some trepidation. Cormac McCarthy’s novel, on which the film is based, is quite simply a literary masterpiece. Could a film live up to it? Clearly not, from a purely literary point of view. But could it deal effectively with the same themes that McCarthy confronts?  The answer is just as clearly ‘yes’. This is not a film to watch if you are feeling down or depressed but despite all the ghastliness and horror it nevertheless ends on the same ambiguous upbeat note as the novel: even in a Hobbesian post-apocalyptic world of cannabalism and worse, idealism and fellow-feeling will survive in humanity and may just ultimately be able to re-colonise the world. Neither the novel nor the film guarantee this, but they give us hope that there will always be a few ‘good guys’ carrying ‘the fire’.

I am sitting at my desk a little bleary-eyed at the moment. I have the BBC website on automatic refresh and, as I write, 649 out of 650 seats have been declared. The polls only closed last night at ten in the evening (eleven Continental time), so the first results only started to trickle through at around one in the morning our time. I confess I sloped off to bed around two. Nothing much seemed to be happening. Labour had held three seats and that was about it. I crawled out of bed again around five-thirty and what a different situation now existed! I have been glued to screens of one sort or another and to the radio and the television and earphones and my telephone ever since then. What an extraordinary race!  At one stage it looked as though the Tories were going to gallop away with it, but they didn’t. Labour held up well in Scotland and less well in Wales. The Lib Dem surge simply didn’t materialise. There was no ‘Ed Balls moment’. Labour was not beaten into third place. The Conservatives have the largest number of seats (306) but do not have the 326 they would need for majority government alone. Labour (258 seats) and the Lib Dems (57) together have more seats. And now the offers and counter-offers and wooing have begun in earnest. In 1979 Jim Callaghan famously said ‘You know there are times, perhaps once every thirty years, when there is a sea-change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or what you do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of.’ This was not one of those moments or, at least, if it was, it was a much more nuanced message. But it seems in any case that the leaders of both the major parties are interpreting this result as a message that the UK’s electoral system needs to be reviewed, if not changed. So, whatever happens, this will almost certainly have been a historical election. Despite a dull start, it turned into a fascinating contest.