Blair missed out on a job he never wanted

Yesterday Belgian prime minister Herman van Rompuy was named as the new EU President

The first consequence of the appointment is that everyone (tabloid headline writers excepted) will now have to start calling him by his proper name rather than the "hilarious", ooh-er missus-style, Rumpy.

That always smacked of arrogance, even a mild form of racism, from those superior nationalities who enjoy poking fun at the little Belgians, or almost any other foreigner from a less powerful country than their own, for that matter.

All very 1970s sit com.

Remember the fun we had in 1995 when, in a remarkably similar stitch-up, Luxembourg's Jacques Santer became Commission President?

Headlines about Santer's little helpers and getting the sack kept us rocking in our seats for weeks. Well, minutes anyway.

The second consequence is we will have to execute a bit of double-think and re-educate ourselves into the fact that Tony Blair did not want the job.

Repeat, Tony Blair did not want the job.

At least, once he realised the other EU states didn't want a charismatic, traffic-stopper, he didn't want the job.

Be fair, he had prepared the ground for this apparent about-face by having friends tell the Times a couple of weeks' ago that he would allow himself to become a candidate if the job was "big enough".

That entirely missed the point, of course. This job will be as big, or small, as the person occupying it for the first time.

The notion that El Presidente Blair would have allowed it to be a second division post, a lollipop lady traffic-stopper rather than a blue light and sirens police escort number is absurd.

The truth is, Sarkozy, Merkel and others decided they wanted the job to be about Europe, not the President.

And what does the EU need most now? Probably a lengthy period of quietly getting on with the job of healing the wounds left by the Lisbon treaty manouverings and mapping a careful, popular way forward.

The third consequence is that the UK's Eurosceptics are going to have to make their minds up.

Complaints that this was another fudge ending with a brace of nonentities suggests they might have preferred a bigger candidate.

Or, perhaps, that this allegedly undemocratic decision-making process should be replaced by direct elections for such posts in future. Guess who would have won that particular X Factor contest.

And, while some might seek to sow panic over the new President's federalist ambitions, others might welcome his resistance to Turkish accession.

And what about the law of unforeseen consequences?

Is it possible that the multi-lingual, poetry-writing President gets so fed up with being described as a grey nonentity, that he decides to seize the historic opportunity offered to him and, Clark Kent-style, nips into a Brussels phone booth to emerge as a pumped-up SuperPres.

Now that would be fun.