Mr. Johnson goes to Brussels

Cor, I thought. This is what it must be like to be in one of those films. You nod off for 10 minutes and you wake up in 200 years' time. We had just pitched up at the Gare du Midi in Brussels and the transformation was incredible. It was 20 years ago that this paper despatched me to the Belgian capital to be its Common Market Correspondent, and in those days the Gare du Midi was a wonderfully dingy place with feral cats and trod-on chips and Turkish taxi drivers snoozing in their battered Mercs and trains departing slowly for First World War destinations like Poperinge.

Now the future had arrived. A vast space-age Eurostar terminal loured over the ancient quartier, and as we headed into the heart of Euroville I couldn't believe my eyes. Poor old Brussels took a terrible pasting in the Fifties, when ruthless British developers moved in and razed so many lovely *maisons de ma*ître, whacking up anonymous office blocks in their place. That was nothing to the destruction now taking place in the name of Europe. As you get to the sites of the burgeoning European institutions, it is as though gigantic alien motherships of glass and steel have crash-landed on the city, dwarfing the cobbled streets and crushing out the patisseries and the gloomy little bars I used to love. Read full article...

AUSTRIAN ANGLE

Cantankerous Cameron would isolate UK

A conservative UK government will cause a European crisis and isolate London, presagesDie Presse, summing up the disastrous consequences for the Continent if David Cameron, currently ahead in the polls, were to move into 10 Downing Street. The Tories have in effect “already splintered the most important parliamentary group in the EP”, preferring the Czech, Polish and other Eurosceptics to Europe’s conservatives, remarks the Viennese daily. “A new gale will be blowing” through the Council, too, as Cameron is hell-bent on giving the Member States more sway, which would make compromising with the British, which has “always been difficult, virtually impossible". What is more, regulating the financial markets would be a pipedream, which is why a high-ranking EU official tells the paper he expects the UK to be isolated in the medium term, except in security matters, where “there’s nothing doing without them”. Finally, notes Die Presse, "If the Tories succeed in persuading Czech president Vaclav Klaus to put off signing the Lisbon Treaty till 2010, it will be blocked once they take over” – and then they can hold a referendum on the treaty, which could bury it for good.