The European Union’s leaders looked anxiously at their watches and asked where the British prime minister was. They’d gathered in a 500-year-old monastery in Lisbon for a special ceremony to sign a landmark treaty, and it wasn’t really the done thing for one of their number not to turn up. It was December 2007, and Gordon Brown was the PM.
“We need Gordon,” then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy was heard to say in English at one point, but when the leaders picked up their pens, Gordon was still in London.
