Tense moment for Santer

Date: 08/05/1997

The morning after the Labour Party swept to victory in the British general election, head of the Spokesman's Service Klaus van der Pas was anxious not to be seen to be gloating over the result.

Asked if his boss, Jacques Santer, was grinning from ear to ear, Van der Pas replied diplomatically: “The president entered the office with the same warm smile he has for everyone.”

But efforts to portray the Commission as totally neutral about the result were undermined by a typing error - or what some believed was a Freudian slip - in the last line of Santer's congratulatory telegram to new Prime Minister Tony Blair.

“I lookd [sic] forward to seeing you soon,” he declared, displaying an unusual amount of prescience. Was this evidence of some pre-election collusion? Officials insist it was not.