Over the last few weeks there’s been a fair bit of heat generated by the suggestion that Tony Blair is interested in trying to become the first occupant of the post of President of the European Council, created by the Lisbon Treaty.

A lot of people seem very opposed to this - there appear to be no fewer than eight different Facebook groups of people opposing it (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), a website and a petition for you to sign.

Personally I can’t get too excited about fighting Blair on this. It may well be that, particularly following his actions on Iraq, he is not the person to take on such an important role on behalf of the EU’s 27 national governments - and that does seem to be the view of a good many of them at the moment. But I think there would also be some benefits (not only to Britain but to the EU as a whole) in having a Brit in that role - not least because it might help the British public to see the EU as a useful way of helping to achieve objectives that the British public (and those of other European countries) want to see achieved, rather than just of creating endless pointless interfering bureaucracies, which is what they largely seem to think it is there for at the moment.

I am more struck by some of the ironies of Blair going for this position.

Firstly, this is a post that will exist at all largely because Blair’s government argued for it, through the Convention. There is clearly some irony (which I have not seen picked up that widely recently) in the main proposer of this role becoming its first occupant - even if this seemed to some of us a distinct possibility at the time. Indeed I wrote here in March 2002 of this role when it was first proposed that its “working title [is] ‘the Tony Blair job’”.

A second irony is that Blair only wants this job if it can be made to be sufficiently important and powerful (and he is going round saying so, much as Paddy Ashdown did with his prospective Afghan job - in this case there may well be several prospective Karzais around the place willing to use their veto). This is consistent with his desire to create a powerful European Council President in the first place, and with his apparent view that government in general, and the EU in particular, needs someone who is in a genuinely powerful position to lead it if it is to achieve things.

But the man now arguing that there should be such a genuinely powerful President of the European Council is the very same person who, when Prime Minister of the UK, consistently fought against almost any extension of the ability of the EU to act effectively together - what he now wants this person to do.

If someone had demanded a few years ago the sort of powers that prospective President Blair is now insisting on for this role, then Prime Minister Blair would have had a fit.

If he now proves unable to convince other European Prime Ministers that they should entrust such significant agenda-setting powers to the new role as he wants, then he should just look in the mirror for the member of the European Council grouping who has done most over the last few years to make that kind of European-level trust impossible.

I suspect however that he will have plenty of time to contemplate some of these ironies, as it does seem that accepting him into this post, which he has both argued for, and made very difficult to work, may be one step too far for his electorate of 27 European Prime Ministers.

In fact we should be taking a step back from all this and asking why we need this role at all. In my view we don’t need such a person, to be yet another senior figure muddying the already crowded waters of people with a legitimate claim to lead and speak for the European Union. Holders of the current rotating six-month presidency of the Council of the EU (almost universally but erroneously described as the “Presidency of the EU”) complain that six months is too short to impose their will on leading the Council and to achieve progress in any priority policy areas.

They are right, of course, but in my view they should not be seeking to do that. The simple task of chairing the EU meetings of Ministers and Prime Ministers should be done in much the same way as it is in the Security Council of the UN: essentially limited to chairing and co-ordinating the meetings, without pretending that for six months there is going to be some great new Slovenian direction for the EU (to pick the example of the current Council Presidency).

For underlying all this there is another battle going on about the relative balance of power between the three principal European institutions: Council, Parliament and Commission.

I take a fairly simple view of this: the people of Europe elect their Parliament every five years, and those who win most votes and seats in those elections should take the lead in developing new policy and setting direction - albeit in a much more consensual and co-operative way than the much more confrontational system that exists in some countries such as the UK. Although not yet quite as straightforward as this, we are making considerable progress towards this (and the Lisbon Treaty helps a little too): it is increasingly now accepted that the President of the European Commission has to come from the political grouping which won the European elections - and they therefore have indeed some mandate (albeit not yet a very direct one).

Blair’s demand is for something completely different: the role of leading Europe, instead of lying to some extent in the elected European Parliament and the person they elect as President of the European Commission, should belong instead, in his view, to the former Prime Minister chosen by his 27 former fellows, to lead the European Council. This shifts the balance towards the 27 European governments, and away from the people we elect every five years to represent us in the European Parliament.

I think this is the wrong way round - not least because we know from many centuries of inter-state negotiations that in such circumstances, governments behave in the narrow interests of themselves as governments, rather than in the interests of the people they are supposed to represent.

European governments are already the most powerful players in approving new European legislation - not the impression they would like you to have, which is why they devote so much energy to seeking to distance themselves from anything it does, and “blame it on the EU”, even though in most cases “the EU” is themselves, meeting as the Council.

We should be focussing our attention instead on scrutinising better what they do in that role: again the Lisbon Treaty helps with this - though the failure here is really one of national Parliaments, including and especially our own House of Commons, which does a very weak job of scrutinising the positions our government takes at EU level.

Do we need this new role of President of the European Council at all? Are powers best concentrated in it than other - perhaps more democratically legitimate - places in the European institutional architecture? And given that it seems likely to exist, could we encourage it to link up better to other institutions and gain a slightly more democratic mandate, by being held by the same person as the President of the Commission, as has been suggested in an interesting proposal from two friends of mine in a call for “One President of the EU“.

It seems at the moment unlikely that these will be questions that Tony Blair will have to struggle with - but the bigger questions about how the EU is run should be of interest to us all.