'Cack-handed' Brown criticised by press over EU signing
LONDON (AFP) — Prime Minister Gordon Brown's absence from the main EU treaty signing ceremony drew brickbats from both pro- and anti-European British media Friday, which described it as "embarrassing" and "cack-handed".
Brown arrived in Lisbon several hours after other European leaders formally sealed the treaty with a lavish showpiece event Thursday. He signed separately in a much more low-key fashion before a swift departure.
On Friday Brown was in Brussels for an EU summit, his first visit there since taking over from Tony Blair in June.
The notoriously Eurosceptic British press laid into Brown's handling of the Lisbon signing ceremony -- the tabloid Daily Express even labelled Brown "Mr Bean", after the bumbling television comedy character.
The Daily Telegraph broadsheet said in an editorial that other European Union leaders were left "incredulous" by his behaviour.
"Gordon Brown has delivered a master-class in how to secure the worst of all possible worlds," it said.
"His maladroit handling of yesterday's formal signing in Lisbon of the new EU reform treaty left him looking indecisive and weak and Britain marginalised."
The right-wing Daily Mail tabloid said that his handling of the ceremony highlighted Brown's dishonesty, citing his failure to give Britons a referendum on the measures despite an election pledge two years ago.
"The spectacle of Gordon Brown scuttling shiftily in and out of Lisbon to sign the European reform treaty was an apt conclusion to what has been a disgracefully dishonest saga," it said in an editorial.
The tabloid Sun, a fierce opponent of the treaty, splashed on the headline "We Shall Never Surrender" next to a picture of Brown signing the treaty.
"Gordon Brown did himself harm at home and abroad yesterday," its editorial said.
"He offended 26 other EU leaders by gracelessly turning up in Lisbon to sign the EU constitution just as everybody else was leaving.
"And he infuriated voters here by breaking his vow to give us a referendum."
The Times broadsheet, which like the Sun is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, described Thursday's performance as "an extraordinary diplomatic episode that was part snub, part standard mess-up and entirely embarrassing."
Brown also got a rough ride from the pro-European press, though.
The left-leaning Guardian broadsheet's columnist Michael White wrote: "Gordon Brown's cack-handed handling of yesterday's EU reform treaty signing achieved a difficult double.
"It won him no brownie points among pro-Europeans, at home or beyond Calais.
"But hardline UK Eurosceptics also gave his efforts a raspberry."
