The ratification of Europe’s Lisbon treaty, now completed by the reluctant signature of the Czech president, Vaclav Klaus, has been dispiriting. The treaty does little to make the European Union any simpler or more transparent, two supposed goals when the negotiations began eight long years ago. Nor will it make the EU more democratic or bring it any closer to ordinary citizens: indeed, voters in three countries said no to its provisions, only for their wishes to be steamrollered.

Yet with Lisbon now entering into force, it is time to move on from the EU’s introspective decade of institutional navel-gazing and turn to the pressing task of making it work better. Even the British Conservatives, who have wisely dropped their promise of a referendum on Lisbon, are slowly realising this (see Bagehot). The first task may come next week, when European leaders choose candidates for the two top jobs being created by Lisbon: the president of the European Council and a beefed-up high representative for foreign policy. Unfortunately, the continent’s rulers are likely to flunk it.

A consensus has emerged that the first council president should be a low-profile fixer, preferably from a small EU country and the political centre-right. That would rule out Britain’s Tony Blair. Mr Blair is also opposed by the Tories, who fear his clout; and by many others because of his role in the Iraq war and his perceived failure as prime minister to push his country closer to the EU. Eurosceptics are against him because the job is unelected, though they ought to favour a strong person chosen by elected leaders to represent national governments, rather than the hated Brussels bureaucracy. None of the declared alternatives to Mr Blair comes near his political heft. Almost comically, a current favourite is the Belgian prime minister of less than a year’s standing, the unknown Herman Van Rompuy, who seems not yet to have acquired as many critics as his longer-serving Dutch and Luxembourgeois counterparts, Jan Peter Balkenende and Jean-Claude Juncker.

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