Dieter RogallaI was sad to learn about the passing away yesterday of former German Social Democrat MEP Dieter Rogalla. After studying law he began a career as a national customs official before joining the European Commission in 1961, where he worked variously in the Customs Union Directorate General, and the Human Resources (in charge of staff regulations) and Development DGs before joining, and heading, the Legal Service. He became a Member of the European Parliament in 1981 and was re-elected in 1984 and 1989. He was a longstanding and distinctive member of the Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs and Industrial Policy and that is how I came to know him, since I shadowed the Committee for the European Commission’s Secretariat General for almost seven years. Rogalla’s trademark was a small red-and-white painted model of a customs barrier, which he would lovingly take out of his briefcase and put on his parliamentary desk every day, with the barrier up. For Rogalla, as a gamekeeper turned poacher, was an indefatigable campaigner for ending national frontiers and harmonising taxes. He taught economics at his alma mater, Münster University, in parallel with his parliamentary career and in retirement practised the law. But his other great passion was cycling. In 1982 he founded Eurotour, a cycling tour through several member states with much symbolic crossing of frontiers. Rogalla last participated himself in 2009 at the age of 82! As an MEP Rogalla practised a gruff and growly attitude to the Commission, and I was frequently the target of his grumbling as, post Single European Act, my institution failed to dismantle barriers and frontiers with sufficient speed for his liking. I never took anything personally and he was always kind to me. I remember him as a good European, beavering away at the creation of a true single market in those heady days when the market was being built more than managed.