Manipulating the concept of merit

Senior appointments in the Commission will always be politically sensitive, but José Manuel Barroso has undermined his credibility.

The grubby trade of journalism – at least as it is currently practised has a tendency to exaggerate the importance of individuals. Journalists and their editors prefer to talk and write about people than about policies and institutions. Part of the explanation is that readers, listeners and viewers find it easier to understand policy and politics when they are expressed in a narrative peopled by recognisable dramatis personae.

Writing about the European Union is not exempt from this general tendency, even if it is occasionally a struggle to find personalities that readers can recognise, let alone warm to. Making one bunch of men in grey suits distinguishable from another bunch of men in grey suits is not easy, and sometimes makes one yearn for the men in white coats.

No doubt this newspaper, along with others, occasionally errs in attributing to European commissioners a greater degree of personal involvement in a policy initiative than is warranted. Sometimes that mistake is made out of a self-deluding wish that a commissioner’s name could by itself breathe life into some mind-numbingly dull consultation on industry standards. More often it is made out of an awareness that all but the most high-minded readers – and the most high-minded journalists – have a fondness for names and faces.

The balance is especially sensitive when writing about the institutions of the EU because the actors are often a mix of politicians and officials. Sensitivity is not usually required where politicians are concerned. They are by their nature publicity-hungry; they like their news couched in terms of personalities as long as it is they who are the centre of attention. But the officials are more problematic. Some are attention-seekers, but others seek only influence and shun the limelight. Some recognise that being in the public eye is a part of being accountable, but others have had attention thrust upon them.

Nevertheless, at the risk of paying too much attention to personalities and of dragging further into the public eye the names of various officials, it is worth examining the statement put out yesterday (2 June) by the European Commission to accompany a statement on the reshuffle of some senior managers.

Commission President José Manuel Barroso couched his reshuffle in terms that were intended to reflect well on him: the promotion of women to top jobs and promotion on merit. “With this package, the Commission, while reaffirming the principle that appointments are made on the basis of merit as a first criterion, ensures the promotion of two female senior officials to director-general functions,” said the Commission statement.

But lest anyone be carried away by this eye-wash, it is worth recalling where this particular reshuffle had its starting-point: 27 November, when Barroso announced the nominations for European commissioners that he had received from the member states and what portfolios he was allocating to them.

Barroso announced then that he was minded to move Jonathan Faull to be director-general for the internal market. It was a sop to Gordon Brown, the UK’s then prime minister, who was terrified of being pilloried in the British press for having allowed a Frenchman, Michel Barnier, to become European commissioner for the internal market and therefore for regulation of financial services (on the French side, Barnier’s nomination was accompanied by some characteristic triumphalism from Nicolas Sarkozy).

Now it is true that Faull was overdue, under the Commission’s rules of rotating senior managers every five or so years, for a change of job. But the post of director-general for internal market was not vacant: Jörgen Holmquist who had been there only two years was not due for rotation. He was uprooted with indecent haste.

Gordon Brown’s capacity for self-inflicted wounds was further exposed when it emerged that Faull’s appointment would mean that the Briton who was deputy director-general for the internal market would have to move, because having two Britons at the top was deemed unacceptable. So David Wright, whose expertise and influence in financial services reform might conceivably have been useful to the British is, like Holmquist, being eased into premature retirement.

That Barroso should have dispensed so casually with Holmquist, who was the only Swede at the level of director-general, makes a nonsense of the claim, repeated in yesterday’s reshuffle announcement that “the Commission aims to maintain a broad geographical balance in order to ensure a fair spread of all the nationalities”.

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Indeed the Faull appointment (through no fault of Faull’s) was doubly botched: Brown was wrong to insist on it; Barroso was wrong to concede it. At a stroke, he undermined the Commission’s previous claims to be making merit the guiding principle of senior management appointments and introducing orderly rotation.

There will be those who argue that appointments at such a senior level in the Commission become charged with politics and it is naive to expect otherwise. That is true, but it is worth pointing out that the casualties are more often the officials than the politicians. And yesterday’s claims to be promoting women and appointing on the basis of merit are founded on humbug. At their root was a shabby deal between Brown and Barroso.