Excerpts from Daniel Hannan’s blog:

When it comes to the EU, a surprising number of people who, in any other context, would consider themselves progressives, line up behind the most anti-democratic project in the western world. Van Rompuy and Ashton are precisely the kind of unelected office-holders that an earlier generation of radicals would have railed against.

Consider their careers. Van Rompuy owes his position to his mastery of Belgium’s labyrinthine coalition trade-offs. A brilliant back-room operator, he went so far as to change the locks of the parliamentary chamber last year in order to prevent Flemish MPs meeting there.

As for Lady Ashton, she has never once taken the trouble to get herself elected to anything. A former chairman of a health authority, she went on to work for a quango before being appointed a life peer. She then steered the Lisbon treaty through the upper house without conceding the referendum that all three parties had promised in their manifestos.

Opposing such a system doesn’t make you anti-Europe; it makes you pro-democracy. Anyone who believes in representative government should be outraged by what happened on Thursday: a lifelong quangocrat was appointed in secret to a post created by a treaty that we never got the chance to vote for.