EUROPEAN LEADERS HAVE NO SENSE OF DIRECTION

THANKS to Brexit, Theresa May is spared the hours of brain-ossifying tedium spent around the Brussels summit table that her predecessors had to endure over four decades.

The Prime Minister flies to the Belgian capital next week for the latest EU Council but is only likely to stay long enough for a brief chat with some of her 27 European counterparts and possibly a couple of one-to-one meetings with key players in the forthcoming Brexit negotiations.

Mrs May could even opt out of the traditional summit banquet where leaders pontificate long into the night over coffee, cognac and petit-fours. She will leave the other 27 to themselves for another lengthy session of hand-wringing about where the beleaguered European bloc goes next.

Their total lack of direction was summed up this week when Jean-Claude Juncker unveiled a report outlining “five avenues for the EU”. The European Commission President appears to have as much idea about which direction to follow as the brainless Scarecrow in the Wizard Of Oz.

Mr Juncker’s possible scenarios for the future ranged from a fully-fledged, centrally-controlled European super-state to the sort of single-market free-trade zone that most British voters thought the country was joining in 1972.

Surely the EU will struggle to maintain a united front among member states in negotiations with the UK if the bloc’s leaders have so little idea about what their organisation is for or where it is bound.

Another route previously ignored by the commission president is possible if anti-EU feeling continues to rise across many of the 27 member states. An instructive opinion poll, highlighted by the Bruges Group think tank this week, showed that 56 per cent of Dutch voters would vote for the Netherlands to leave the EU if they were given the option in a referendum.

And a victory for the rabidly anti-Brussels candidate Marine Le Pen in the French presidential poll in April and May would deal a death blow to the EU in its current form.

Perhaps Mr Juncker’s road map should have included a sixth avenue that involves giving up on a bad job and scrapping the EU altogether.