Europe

The BBC reports that Enda Kenny’s Fine Gael party has reached agreement with Eamon Gilmore’s Labour party. The new coalition is understood to be determined to renegotiate the precise terms of its EU/IMF bailout. If they succeed (which is far from certain) they will have served two purposes: first, to obtain a better deal for the Irish taxpayer; and second, to give the government a nourishing political victory over ‘the Germans', now loathed by Ireland's boisterous eurosceptic movement.  So, will it be an easy coalition? There is a tendency in Britain to define all politics in terms of left and right; already the BBC is busy with ‘centre-right Fine Gael’ and ‘centre-left Labour’.

PoliticsHome reports that the government is to ask the ECHR to reconsider its verdict in the prisoner voting rights case. The website says: ‘In a response to a parliamentary question from Labour MP Gordon Marsden, Cabinet Office Under-Secretary Mark Harper said: "We believe that the court should look again at the principles in "Hirst" which outlaws a blanket ban on prisoners voting, particularly given the recent debate in the House of Commons."’ This is unsurprising. Last month, the government asked its lawyers to advise on the ramifications of noncompliance. The lawyers were unequivocal: the repercussions of such defiance was diplomatically impossible and extremely expensive.

Boris kicks off his Telegraph column today by observing that Colonel Gaddafi and Gordon Brown "look vaguely similar". And yet the really provocative copy, at least so far as the government is concerned, is reserved for the final paragraph: "It is bonkers [by pushing for AV] to be pursuing the last manoeuvre of a cornered Gordon Brown. By all means let us have a referendum – the one we were promised, on the Lisbon EU Treaty. Have you noticed the EU policy on North Africa? Have you heard much from Baroness Ashton? Shouldn't we have a vote on all that?" It's hardly a secret that Boris wanted a referendum on Lisbon: he said as much in an interview before the 2009 Tory conference, and irritated the party leadership in the process.

President Nicolas Sarkozy has struck again, forcing the resignation of his dictator-friendly and gaffe-prone foreign minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, in the hope of shoring up the French government after a terrible couple of weeks. She will be replaced by Defence Minister Alain Juppé, a heavyweight conservative who was prime minister in the 1990s. Speaking to the nation on Sunday, Sarkozy suggested re-launching the Mediterranean Union and called for a meeting of the European Council to discuss Europe's response to the Arab revolutions. Getting European leaders together is a good idea. The scramble by each European country to get their citizens out of Libya could probably have done with a little more coordination.

Do head over to ConservativeHome, where Tim Montgomerie has put together a comprehensive guide to the revamped Downing Street operation. I won't spoil its considerable insights here, except to highlight this: "An analysis of papers sent to Downing Street and the Cabinet Office has revealed that just 40% are directly related to the Coalition's programme. Roughly 30% come from the Whitehall bureaucracy and another 30% from the EU." James makes the point in his latest politics column that Tory ministers are becoming more and more Eurosceptic as they face the EU in government. That pile of European directives in the in-tray must just be getting too much.

Enough is enough. The British Bill of Rights is set to return: a consequence of the government’s running battle with parliament over the European Convention on Human Rights. Recent days have been filled with clues and suggestions of imminent reform: Dominic Grieve, a former advocate of the ECHR, went so far as to assert that Britain may leave the convention. Cameron let slip the news that a Bill Of Rights commission is to be convened at PMQs; at the time he was answering a question about the Supreme Court’s controversial sex offenders’ register decision. There are no details as to what the commission will consider, but Theresa May aired the guiding philosophy during her statement on the sex offenders’ register.

Yesterday, parliament asserted its supremacy before the European Court of Human Rights. As Ross Clark explains, it has been a long time coming. The Final Indignity, 10th November 2001 by Ross Clark It wasn't so long ago that the very mention of the words 'European Convention on Human Rights' in conservative circles was enough to provoke frothing at the mouth. Of all the horrors to emanate from the Continent, here was the final humiliation: British ministers ordered around by the bigwigs of European justice. No longer would we be able to beat our children or tell them that they can't wear earrings and Motorhead T-shirts to their Latin lessons. Murderers, rapists and all would be let loose on the streets, their incarceration ruled illegal on some technicality.

The Davis Straw motion on keeping the ban on prisoner votes has just passed by 234 votes to 22. It is a crushing victory on what was a very good turnout given that both front benches were not voting. The 22 against the motion were a bunch of Liberal Democrats plus the Ulster MP Lady Hermon, the Plaid MPs Jonathan Edwards, Elfyn Llwyd and Hywel Williams, the Green Caroline Lucas,   Labour MPs Barry Gardiner, Kate Green, Glenda Jackson, Andy Love, Kerry McCarthy, John McDonnell, Yasmin Quereshi  and  one Tory Peter Bottomely, David Cameron now finds himself between a rock and a hard place. His MPs hate the idea of giving prisoners the vote and if he tries to force them to do it, he’ll end up in a very messy fight.