In a seven-minute televised address yesterday President Chirac responded to the people’s resounding rejection of the EU Constitution.  There are three (not unpredictable) threads to his response.

1. The direction of Europe will not be fundamentally affected by the May 29 vote.  Chirac said quite specifically, “It was not a rejection of the European ideal. It was a demand to be heard, a demand for action, a demand for results.”  The people – as all elites averr when it suits them – were not answering the question put before them.  They were voting on the French economy.

2. As a rejection of French unemployment the vote was also a rejection of the Anglo-Saxon economic model (code for market discipline) with which the Constitution was, apparently, heavily imbued.  You might consider this perverse and an egregious conflation.  But Chirac is an opportunist, like all politicians, and the referendum vote provides an opportunity to rein in British influence in Europe.

3. The French governmental predeliction for paternalism and elitism sails on unaffected.  Chirac explained his Prime Ministerial appointment of Dominique de Villepin as a response to “worries” and “expectations” about, basically, unemployment.  Quite what “action” and “results” a career diplomat, gris eminence and would-be man of letters who has never once stood for election will be able to effect (and through “The French model”) remains to be seen.

Plus ça change …

Meanwhile across the water in market-mad Britain the Tory Party’s pro-European centrists have been running off at the mouth ever since Michael Howard’s morning-after speech and getting terribly excited about Bilderberger Ken’s chances of finally – and at the third time of asking – winning the Party leadership.  The French referendum result was supposed to release Ken Clarke from the shackles of his Europhilia and make him acceptable to all.  But whoops … a YouGov poll for the Telegraph finds that fifty-four percent of local Party members want the centre-right Shadow Home Secretary David Davis as leader. 

The findings, which suggest that the contest is becoming a one-horse race outside Westminster, makes grim reading for supporters of Kenneth Clarke, the Europhile former chancellor. He is seen as completely unacceptable by 54 per cent of party members, with only 19 per cent naming him as their first or second choice …

Admirers of Mr Clarke, 64, admitted that the poll could mark the end of the road for his leadership ambitions.

A senior MP from the Left of the party said: “It is a dose of reality showing who the party is prepared to accept.”

Claims that the French No to the European Union constitution would defuse Europe as an issue and therefore increase Mr Clarke’s chances had been overblown, he said.

“If you don’t like Ken, you are not going to like him any more just because you think will be no referendum here in the next few months.”

Another leading Tory who has backed Mr Clarke in two previous leadership elections said: “The poll seems to show that every politician has his sell-by date.”

Wisely, given Chirac’s constipated response to his referendum defeat, Tory members are concluding that a greater, not lesser, emphasis on Euroscepticism and on getting the State out of people’s lives is required.

Today the focus switches to our Dutch friends.  There, too, the entire political establishment is pulling for a “Yes” vote without any hope of success.

Polls in the Netherlands showed the “yes” campaign trailing by 20 points, and even the most ardent supporters of the constitution admitted that it would be a “small miracle” if they win today. The European Commission and seven member states which have called referendums insisted that ratification would proceed regardless. But officials privately conceded that a second emphatic “no” from a founding member would probably prove fatal.

“There is a limit to what we can say before the Dutch vote. But things will change afterwards if they say ‘no’,” one Commission source admitted.

Once again, the centre-right government of Jan Peter Balkenende could claim that rising unemployment and the sharp recession of 2003 caused voters to get it all wrong and overlook the Constitution.  But the Dutch may be beginning, at least a little, to doubt the Euro.  They certainly don’t like their status as, per capita, the EU’s biggest nett contributors.  So Europe and economics are not quite so distanced as in France.

The effect of a Dutch “No” will most likely be a prolonged period of European paralysis.  Romania and Bulgaria will gain admission.  Turkey’s application will be shelved.  Ukraine’s, too, somewhat unjustly.  The fracture between advocates of the English and French “models”, which is really geopolitical in nature, will widen.

These are good times for Euroscepticism – but only in so much as we have been saved from being pulled over the clifftop.  And we’re not definitively safe from that yet.