Seen as Mr Blair’s project, the intention was to persuade Gibraltarians to accept an agreement under which Britain and Spain would share sovereignty in perpetuity, while the colony’s language and institutions were preserved. The calculation was that changes in Spain – an amenable Spanish Prime Minister (Jose Maria Aznar) and Spain’s membership of the European Union and Nato – would convince Gibraltarians that they had more to gain than lose from a settlement. The Foreign Office appeared genuinely surprised at the level of resistance in Gibraltar. When residents of the Rock demonstrated that they would not reverse their near-unanimous vote against a less favourable settlement in 1967, the whole project was summarily, but very quietly, dropped.To blame this string of failures either on the Foreign Office exclusively, or on the current Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, would be wrong.

In Mr Blair’s second term, Downing Street has been steering foreign policy as at no time in the recent past. And where there has been failure, it has been not only in implementation, but in conception and, above all, in a miscalculation of how the other party will respond.. The war of words between Britain and France is much bigger than a row over the right strategy to pursue on Iraq It has become a battle over the future of Europe too. It has become a battle over the future of Europe too.
One British minister said yesterday: “This is about what kind of Europe we have – the British vision, with close links with the United States, or the French vision, a rival power block to the US, with France at the centre.”Downing Street’s view is that President Jacques Chirac has used the Iraq crisis to pursue his vision, buoyed by his re-election as French President last year and free with one bound from needing to “cohabit” with a socialist prime minister.Perhaps Mr Blair underestimated President Chirac’s desire to use his new domestic power to become the strongman of Europe. One warning sign came when the two leaders had a stand-up row over the Common Agricultural Policy at an EU summit in Brussels last October.On Iraq, some British officials are believed to have warned that France was not bluffing when it threatened to use its veto at the United Nations.

Yet ministers, including Mr Blair, have believed that President Chirac would back down and not block military action. When he gave his television interview on Monday, saying France would not allow the UN to pass a resolution allowing a war, this judgement seemed spectacularly wrong.Some observers believe that Mr Blair, anxious to play his much-vaunted role as the “bridge” between Europe and America, promised different things to France and the US in order to secure the passage of UN resolution 1441 in November. France had always wanted a second resolution before a war, while America saw no need for one. Perhaps Mr Blair hoped that his powers of persuasion would somehow square the circle.Mr Blair cannot understand why France, having signed up to Resolution 1441, does not see the “logic” of following it through. In turn, the French do not understand why Britain will not give the UN inspectors more time. There is also bemusement at Mr Blair’s determination to do Washington’s bidding.

“Why didn’t we have a joint European approach to the UN all along?” asked one French official.Whatever happens over Iraq, the scars of the battle between London and Paris will take a long time to heal. A prolonged period of froideur could change the new blueprint for the European Union that emerges from the convention chaired by Valery Giscard d’Estaing, the former French President.France has more in common with Britain than with Germany, which favours a more federal approach. But it may now be much harder for London to make tactical alliances with Paris, which will be keen to boost the power of the recently-revived Franco-German engine. “Iraq is going to make the convention very difficult for us,” one British Government source admitted.