Cognac for breakfast? Dave’s EU nemesis has FAR worse skeletons in his closet

A Nazi father-in-law. A rival’s suicide. Even rumours of a love-child. Not to mention Mr Juncker’s nasty habit of blowing taxpayers’ millions on white elephants . . .

Leaving aside, for now, the disquieting suggestion that the newly elected President of the european Commission slurps cognac with his breakfast, one shudders to think what might become of us when the continent’s wallet falls into his nicotine-stained hands.

visiting Jean- Claude Juncker’s Luxembourg fiefdom this week, i was momentarily reassured to discover that David Cameron’s least favourite eurocrat lives in a modest house, pootles about the suburbs with his blue-rinsed wife in a volvo estate, and dresses like a low-grade bank clerk.

He also enjoys some decidedly plebeian pastimes, such as playing on pinball machines.

Yet we fall for his cultivated manof-the-people image at our peril.

During his 18-year prime ministership of Luxembourg, this louche little man with the rheumy eyes, rumpled blue mac and skewiff tie developed some worryingly expensive habits — and this doesn’t refer to his weakness for glenfarclas malt whisky, bottles of which he is said to have stashed in a fridge behind his desk.

Far more troubling was Mr Juncker’s penchant for lavishing public money on grandiose projects, the cost of which invariably soared way beyond the original estimate.

One obvious example greets you the moment you touch down at Findel, Luxembourg’s renovated international airport, which came in millions over budget — not least because the Juncker administration decided it needed a new train terminal.

The one hitch? The terminal is utterly useless because it still hasn’t been connected to the main rail network, years after the rest of the work was completed.

Yet surely the biggest of Jean-Claude Juncker’s white elephants is to be found 15 miles south of the capital, in the grim industrial heartland where our new head commissioner was born and raised.

Here, seeking to re-invest some of the reserves Luxembourg has accrued by giving succour to secretive finance houses, tax- dodging tycoons and corrupt Third World dictators, he set about creating his grand vision: a futuristic new city.

it would be built around the abandoned relics of what was once the world’s biggest steelworks: the smoke-belching powerhouse upon which the country’s modern- day banking wealth was founded.

Fittingly, this architectural miracle would rise, phoenix-like, barely a mile from the terraced house where he lived as a boy.

His f ather, Joseph — who is believed to be still alive and living in an old people’s home — had toiled in this steelworks when it forged the alloys that rebuilt much of post-- War europe. The site, called Belval, is the size of 120 football pitches, and will boast dozens of gleaming, concrete-and-class buildings.

Before Juncker was forced out of office last October, his government, in partnership with private backers, pumped tens of millions into this development.

You won’t be surprised to learn that it has also received generous regeneration grants from the european Union, whose starry blue signs are very visible.

WHETHER it will ever justify this massive investment is open to debate. Today, almost a decade after work began, many of the shops, offices and flats remain empty, new roads and bridges lead nowhere, and completion is still a distant dream.

Why? an explanation came from retired French footballer Sebastian Schemmel, 39, who runs a boutique and restaurant there, named Upton Park, after the stadium of West Ham United, for whom he once played. ‘There just aren’t enough people living here to keep us in business,’ he told me glumly.

‘The apartments aren’t selling because they’re too expensive, so it’s only busy when there’s a big rock concert.’

For the rest of europe, this colossal folly on Juncker’s doorstep sends out a worrying signal, as does the airport with its rail terminal to nowhere. as one journalist put it: ‘if he can’t run a small country l i ke ours efficiently, how can he hope to control 28 countries and 30,000 staff?’

How indeed? and more pertinently, how did a small-time politician — who was anonymous beyond his own country until last week — land such a pivotal job?

Tracing the rise of this arch-federalist, who passionately believes in the expansion of the EU and the transfer of powers away f rom national governments, one must at least admire the way he has shinned up the greasiest pole in politics.

given his lack of academic prowess, it must have taken enormous drive and ambition — though these characteristics seem wholly at odds with his shambling manner (the Lib--

Dem MEP Sally Bowles says he often arrives at important meetings armed only with a few notes scrawled on a hotel’s bedside notepad).

However, since the supine Luxembourg press never scrutinises its politicians, we have only his own version of how a belowaverage l aw student r ose to become Secretary of State f or Labour by his 28th birthday.

In a rare interview, he portrayed his early life as a working-class idyll.

Born in 1954, his major influence was his father, Joseph, who was forcibly conscripted into the Nazi army during the War and packed off to the Russian front. He bore the scars of combat — mental and physical — for the rest of his days, but stoically declined to discuss his suffering.

Juncker, associates say, rarely complains or explains, either.

For the first two years of his life, his family lodged with his maternal grandparents before scraping enough money to live independently. Jean-- Claude was five when they moved into a tenement building, where life was regulated by the wailing steelworks siren that signalled the start of his father’s shifts.

As a boy, he mingled with people of different nationalities. The French border was just a couple of miles away, Germany and Belgium not far beyond, and he spent hours on the knee of an Italian ‘uncle’ who lived in his building.

Perhaps this early internationalism imbued an indifference to national identities that’s far from a handicap i n the smoke- filled parlours where Europe’s unelected mandarins cut the deals and fashi on the arcane directives that increasingly affect our lives.

He was also adept at making wellplaced friends, winning them over with his disarming manner. Among them was Jacques Santer — a name that should ring alarm bells.

Santer, we recall, was also Luxembourg’s premier before being installed as European Commissioner — a job way beyond his capabilities.

He was forced to resign with his entire commission in 1999 after a multi-million EU fraud scandal was uncovered. A later ally was German Chancellor Heinrich Kohl, who called him ‘junior’.

Juncker attended a boarding school in Belgium and university in Alsace, where he is thought to have met his future wife, Christiane Frising.

CHRISTIANE’S f ather was one of Hitler’s socalled Propaganda Commissars, and was among those responsible for the Germanification of his home country of Luxembourg. He also helped enforce the Nuremburg Laws that stripped Jews of their rights, and were a precursor to the Holocaust.

Juncker cannot be accountable for the sins of his father-in-law, yet he has never spoken of this dark chapter in his family’s past: it has only come to light via the German media.

In Luxembourg, the one publication to investigate his secrets, Luxembourg Private, is a magazine widely decried by the chattering classes as scurrilous and unreliable.

The magazine has not only accused him of excessive drinking with headlines such ‘He’s So Alcoholic’ — although Juncker has strenuously denied he has an alcohol problem — but has laid other, more damaging accusations at his door.

One story explored the possibility that he may have fathered a lovechild by an unnamed Brussels adviser — without producing a shred of proof, and when the magazine put it to him he denied it outright.

Another, in a book by the magazine’s investigators, suggested he played an unwitting part in the alleged suicide of brilliant economist Ferdinand Rau, a colleague in Mixing business and pleasure: But Juncker strenuously denies any alcohol problem the Christian Socialist Party who was hit by a truck in 1994. The inference, again not supported by f acts, was t hat Rau became depressed after Juncker and others thwarted his political ambitions. This week, when I approached Mr Rau’s widow, Hilda Rau-Scholtus, she declined to comment.

Another mysterious episode in Juncker’s past came in 1989, when he was almost killed in a serious car accident, after which he was in a coma for two weeks.

Apparently he was driving at the time, but he has said he ‘doesn’t like talking about’ the crash and it has never been publicly explained.

However, his left leg was badly damaged and his injuries stopped him playing football, volleyball and handball. Now, his summer sport is table-tennis, and ‘for the rest of the year I’m perversely fanatical about pinball’.

Juncker believes his near- death experience has made him ‘more thoughtful and serious’, and also ‘more joyful and funny’.

SO WHAT about his drinking, which has become such a source of controversy in recent days? Ben Fayot, a retired socialist MEP who has clashed with Juncker in the past, says: ‘Of course he likes a drink. You can’t underestimate that. But I think he’s strong enough to overcome it. I hope so.

‘ Have I seen him wandering about? No. But it affected him sometimes, for instance when he was in a meeting and he was not as present as he should have been.’

A political journalist who flew on Juncker’s official plane also told me how flight attendants were told to make sure it was well stocked with gin and tonic before take-off.

Far more seriously, the German magazine Stern alleged last week that during his term as prime minister, Juncker learned that the former leader of the African state of Congo-Brazzaville, Pascal Lissouba, stashed away $ 155 million he plundered from state coffers in a Luxembourg-based bank, but chose to do nothing.

But Juncker’s darkest hour came last year, following the publication of a 141-page parliamentary report revealing how the Luxembourg secret service, for which he held responsibility, spied and kept files on 300,000 of its half-million subjects.

Rather than lose an election for the first time in his career, Juncker opted to resign as premier.

For all this, when you ask most Luxembourgers what they think of their backroom- dealing former leader, they say they admire him.

They will tell you he has done more than anyone in the nation’s history, archdukes and all, to place it at the forefront of European affairs. It may be the size of Surrey, but today it is not just at the geographical crossroads of the continent, it’s at the political hub, too.

This week, David Cameron has come in for an almighty shellacking for refusing to back their favourite son, but Juncker’s former parliamentary sparring partner, Ben Fayot, suggests a way for them to mend their fences.

‘Perhaps they could sit down and have a drink together,’ he said wryly. ‘And I don’t mean a nice cup of tea.’

You had to laugh. But the prospect of Britain’s strings being pulled by a pie-eyed pinball-wizard with a penchant for taxpayer-funded white