Mandelson Misses Sarkozy Event But Denies Snub

Britain's European trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, is to stay away from an Elysée Palace dinner hosted by President Nicolas Sarkozy next week, in what is being seen as a snub in the midst of a war of words between Paris and Brussels.

France takes over the rotating six-month presidency of the EU next Tuesday, July 1. To mark the occasion, Sarkozy is giving a dinner for the European Commission in Paris on Tuesday evening, a traditional event at the start of each EU presidency.

But Mandelson will not attend. He is scheduled to be in Paris on official business on Tuesday, but plans to take the fast train to Marseilles in the evening for a trade meeting.

After a few weeks of tension between Paris and Brussels, the gloves came off at the weekend when Sarkozy publicly named Mandelson as being partly culpable for the recent Irish referendum defeat of the EU's reforming Lisbon treaty.

Mandelson took to the airwaves to defend himself, declaring his skin was thick enough to withstand the barbs.

He is also charged by the French with being too liberal in his conduct of world trade talks. There is a conviction in Brussels that France is seeking to sabotage Mandelson's efforts to clinch a deal this year and that Sarkozy will use his six months in the EU chair to wreck the chances of a breakthrough in the talks.

"For the French, Mandelson is the embodiment of everything they are frightened of," said an official in Brussels. "Free trade, anti-protectionism, pro-globalisation."

While Mandelson's office confirmed he will not attend the gala dinner, it denied he was boycotting the event. But the July 1 evening at the Elysée has been pencilled into Brussels diaries for months.

In a pointed, if coded, warning to the French yesterday, José Manuel Barroso, the commission president, told European national leaders "to put up or shut up".

At the end of last week's EU summit in Brussels preoccupied with the fallout from Ireland's rejection of the Lisbon Treaty, Sarkozy said Mandelson was culpable for the damning verdict and also linked his stewardship of EU trade policy to the plight of starving children in the developing world.

The Sarkozy camp has also repeatedly, if mostly privately, criticized Barroso over the past two weeks. The mood in Brussels is one of outrage at the French conduct and mystification as to why Sarkozy should be getting his EU presidency off to such a bad-tempered start. "It's baloney, garbage," said one commission official of the French vilification, pointing out it is the responsibility of EU member states, and not of EU institutions in Brussels, to see through ratification of treaties.