French ‘smear’ Britain’s EU chief Baroness Ashton

February 8, 2010 by Infowars Ireland

Bojan Pancevski
www.timesonline.co.uk
February 7, 2010

FRENCH politicians have been accused of orchestrating a smear campaign against Baroness Ashton, the European Union’s top diplomat, claiming she is “lazy”, incompetent and in the pocket of Britain.

Officials in Paris are said to be upset that Ashton is not able to speak French, has surrounded herself with British advisers in Brussels and returns to London every Friday to be briefed by the Foreign Office.

Some of the Labour peer’s French critics have even gone public with their attacks — just weeks after she was plucked from relative obscurity to become the EU’s first foreign minister, or “high representative”.

While Ashton’s supporters believe the slurs have not been directly sanctioned by Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, the suspicion is that they are emanating from people around him acting on a “freelance” basis.

British sources fear the campaign threatens to undermine Ashton’s position and is, in part, a tit-for-tat move following terse exchanges between Downing Street and the Elysée Palace over the appointment of the Frenchman Michel Barnier as the EU’s internal market commissioner.

French officials are understood to be concerned that Ashton, 53, may be falling under too much UK influence, citing the fact that more than a third of her 11-member cabinet are British.

Media reports derived from French briefings have falsely claimed that Ashton failed to receive security clearance for access to confidential documents and said that she refuses to take official phone calls after 8pm.

The Brussels correspondent of Libération, the French newspaper, described the peer as “lazy” and “uninterested”.

Last month Pierre Lellouche, France’s Europe minister, publicly criticised Ashton for not travelling to Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake to “wave the flag for Europe”.

Barnier and Joseph Daul, head of the centre-right group in the European parliament, have also expressed concerns about the peer, previously an EU trade commissioner. Read more…