'Brown's EU fraud exposed by letter'

The new European Union Treaty has been designed to "keep the advances" of the old constitution "that we would not have dared present directly", a senior Brussels figure has admitted.

Hans-Gert Poettering, president of the European Parliament and a close ally of the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, made the admission in a letter to Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the architect of the discarded EU Constitution.

Mr Poettering stressed that the new treaty, while complicated, would preserve the constitution by a different, more indirect method. London Telegraph