Britain's new EU foreign and security policy chief, Lady Ashton, used the platform of the European parliament today to hit back at the chorus of criticism that has enveloped her first three months in the job.
In a combative performance outlining early views on how to make EU foreign policy more effective, the Labour peer signalled the start of "assertive leadership" and blamed the turf wars raging in Brussels over the shape and powers of a new European diplomatic service for her plight.
She also risked reviving a bitter UK-French feud over defence, promising to review calls for a permanent EU military planning headquarters based in Brussels. The British are strongly opposed to such an HQ, believing it would undermine Nato and dilute the Atlantic alliance while the French have long lobbied for a new Brussels office as a means of boosting independent European defence capacities.
Smarting from the whispering campaign against her being conducted in EU capitals for weeks, Ashton briefly switched into French and German, speaking a sentence of each, in an attempt to assuage those unhappy with her lack of language skills. She listed every place she had visited in recent weeks, from New York to Sarajevo to Moscow, to dampen criticism of her schedule and complaints about meetings she has missed.
"My difficulty is that I haven't yet learned to time travel," she quipped in an attempt to silence the doubters.
She brushed aside taunts that her private office is top-heavy with British officials. "I will appoint on merit – nothing else," she said. "There are no favourites here."
Ashton is charged with building and leading a new European diplomatic machine, the External Action Service. The service, the EU's most ambitious new structure in many years, is the focus of an intense power struggle in Brussels between the European commission and European governments.
While Ashton is seeking to tip the balance of power towards the governments, senior players in the parliament today supported José Manuel Barroso, the commission president.
Ashton described the new service as "a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build something that finally brings together all the instruments of our engagement in support of a single political strategy. If we pull together, we can safeguard our interests. If not, others will make decisions for us. It really is that simple."
She repeated remarks from the foreign secretary, David Miliband, last week that demand for European foreign policymaking was outstripping supply and criticised vested interests and bureaucratic blocking tactics in Brussels. "There is a tendency to put process ahead of outcomes in Europe," she said. "Any time you create something new, there will be resistance. Some prefer to minimise perceived losses rather than maximise collective gains."
Ashton said her aim was to concentrate on the aims and then work out how to achieve them as well as fashioning "joined-up" policies from the disparate and often rival parts of the EU machine.
On the issue of a new defence planning HQ, Ashton called for a "serious debate … the question is whether we need something else."
Her remarks today followed talks in Paris last Friday with Hervé Morin, the French defence minister and a trenchant critic of Ashton's performance as EU foreign policy head. Her comments prompted accusations that she was "a handmaiden" for European military and political integration.
Geoffrey Van Orden, the Conservative MEP, alleged she was plotting a policy shift that would "ratchet up" EU military integration at the expense of Nato. She denied the charge.
The EU now uses Nato's Shape HQ and national centres for planning and co-ordinating military missions abroad.
A Brussels-based dedicated HQ, said the French defence ministry afterwards, would be a "capacity, desired by a majority of member states, [and] would improve the EU's responsiveness in the launch of operations and would also be a factor for making cost savings".