I had lunch today with Jean-Claude Eeckhout who, although long since retired, remains a special adviser to the European Commission and an honorary representative on several administrative boards. Jean-Claude was my first director in the secretariat general of the European Commission, back in the mid-1980s. His own European career began at Euratom in the early 1960s. Having worked with Albert Coppé, he was recruited to the Commission’s secretariat general by its first, longstanding Secretary General, Emile Noël, and despite working thereafter for a number of European Commissioners, was always considered to be ‘on loan’ from Noël (who spent an extraordinary twenty-seven years in the top job!). Having known virtually every Commissioner from the 1960s through to the noughties, and having served as an ‘Antici’, Jean-Claude is an endless source of fascinating anecdotes about the Commission and the Council and the integration process more generally. He is also, to my mind, a living link with the very beginning, for Jean-Claude met Jean Monnet. He remembers him as a surprisingly reserved and soft-spoken person, but one who knew his own mind and could be direct. Jean-Claude’s hilarious anecdote about Walter Hallstein, a hot summer’s day, an avion taxi from Strasbourg and a munster cheese stuffed under Hallstein’s seat is best left to the imagination…