There is a Woman Finds What You See is What You Get Acceptable: Keep Your Behaviour For Her, Brown

Details of Brown’s latest bullying outburst in which 'he hurled a torrent of abuse at EU Foreign Minister Baroness Ashton in a row over the way she is doing her job' and 'swore repeatedly at the Baroness over the telephone, leaving her shaken,' is reported in the Mail.  'According to one source, he accused her of ‘letting Britain down’'

Even for Brown this is an unprecedentedly offensive failure of understanding of his relations to others. The European Union appointed the High Representative and the post is a European, not United Kingdom, responsibility.  David Miliband is the UK Foreign Secretary and the best of British luck to us all in having our national foreign relations policies in his banana-clutching hands.

Catherine Ashton is making and enacting foreign policy for Federal Europe, of which the United Kingdom is but a 27th part, and only partially attached at that.  The European High Representative is not a New Labour cadre answering to its corrupt and shortly to be removed regime.  Europe has rejected New Labour's candidate for its Presidency and, were it capable of honesty even to itself, new Labour must recognise also that Europe  took Commission President Barroso's candidate for its Foreign Secretary.  Both the 'Lisbon' posts were denied to the Project, as New Labour politicians have long been nothing more than 'useful idiots'  delivering an unwilling United Kingdom people into the real  Project of a federal European state.

It is encouraging for Europeans that this foul-mouthed diatribe has been delivered.  The High Representative is clearly getting on with the job (to borrow a phrase) she has undertaken and, correctly, working within the European Union's objectives for its foreign relations.  Specific criticisms thrown so vulgarly at her recently have included representing the European Union at the installation ceremonies for the newly-elected Ukrainian President.  Of course she did.  While political shifts in stance in Ukraine achieved by democratic vote are particularly galling for UK foreign policy narratives, they are most  satisfactory for continental European relations that include Russia as an economic and industrial partner.  Furthermore,  Foreign Representative Ashton was quite right not to engage in disaster tourism and equally right to ensure large quantities of appropriate EU aid, supervised by competent technicians, for Haiti.

The construction of a non-NATO European military force is a politically sensitive, long-term, developing initiative that is almost impossible to consider and comment on from the outside; but if a public shindig felt slighted by the Foreign Representative's absence at a geo-politically crucial occasion elsewhere, perhaps they might care to contribute towards providing the means of being in two places at once.