Roaming, Football and my 10,000th vote!

9.00 A later start today. Again no controversy on votes. I draft a note for circulation to the shadow rapporteurs on the amendments to the Innovation report. This is not technically necessary but it may speed up organising some compromises and make the exchange of views next week more fruitful.

11.00 Meet with Reed Elsevier on scientific publishing. There is a report on creation of an EU digital repository. The idea is that scientific papers should be made available to it freely. This is a noble principle but there seem to be problems in how publishers recoup the cost of organising peer review. This is something I do need to investigate further.

11.45 Have meeting with Olle Schmidt who has asked to be updated on the current situation on payments.

12.30 Votes. A photographer comes to take pictures of me in plenary holding a sign saying 10,000 votes. This is while we are voting. All my colleagues want to know what it is about and I am nervous they will draw too much attention to it and the President might notice. I am not sure that holding up notices in plenary is allowed! The votes seem to go so fast that she has difficulty in catching us with our hands up so it all takes much longer that expected, but in the end job safely done.

13.30 Have lunch with Ansgar Tietmeyer from Deutsche Bank. Predictably, the subject of conversation in payments. Everyone is getting worried that we are not getting closer to a solution. He also draws my attention to some points for which I had fought that have now gone from the Presidency text. This is useful but I fear it is yet another example of how detail gets squashed out in the inter-institutional stage.

15.00 I eventually find the room where the Group foreign affairs team are meeting on Kashmir. It is a small room and already there are too many Lib Dems there, so I leave it to Saj and Liz. They will not be at the meerting tomorrow so I will take over then.

15.15 Back to office work then French lesson at 17.00. We play a tape of Chirac’s speech when he announces he is not running for President again. This is good listening practice. We then talk about some of the points and I have to explain that the French definition of Liberal in the political sense is not the same as in the UK.

18.30 Back to the office to assemble papers on football and roaming.

19.00 Down to Group. We complete the roaming discussion. Diana who has listened as a ‘neutral’ says she agrees with me that the consumer cap regulation on retail is needed. The shadow on football agrees with my amendments but we start to run out of time again and so we agree to delegate the submission of amendments on football to those who have worked on it. We have a private discussion and agree to meet to finalise next week.
Leave at 9.00pm