EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT: Rocco Buttiglione row: Barroso forced to withdraw nominees

Robert Atkins MEP (Conservative, North West) interview SOT - if he succumbs to pressure from the Left and the Liberals to change some of the candidates who we don't support, then we won't support the new Commission i/c Peter Mandelson (EU Trade Commissioner-designate) interview SOT - I'm not sure that it represents an erosion of power on the part of governments or member states, but if you are going to have parliamentary hearings, or parliamentary grillings as we've had, in some cases then they are bound to have unpredictable outcomes & in one or two cases they have / member states can't ignore that, they can't say on the one hand 'Parliament exercise your responsibility to interview the Commissioners and reach a view, but if you reach a view that is inconvenient to us then we're going to ignore it' that's not politics, that's not right / I have mixed feelings about Mr Buttiglione - I happen to think he's entitled to his views, he's entitled to his beliefs, I've said so, I've defended him, publicly, as well as in the Commission informal meeting we had last week, the problem is not so much the views he holds which he is entitled to, which are sincere, religious-based views, the problem has arisen in some of his subsequent comments, interventions, which have stirred the pot and made it harder for people right across the political spectrum to give him that support / I think those who try to turn this into some sort of clerical/anti-clerical battle for the 21st century are way off the mark, it's really not about that, nobody is saying that someone with strongly held Catholic convictions and beliefs shouldn't be a member of the European Commission, they have every right & reason to be, but when it comes to the policy that that Commissioner will follow, the parliament want to be satisfied that he will be following beliefs rather than prejudices Clean Feed Tape = D0509455 OR D0509456 00:01:13:00 - 00:08:00:00 FX/Mix Programme as Broadcast Tape = D0509454 O...