Party candidates selected by votes of MEPs, open manifestos and pitches, a public QMV vote by governments and EP confirmation – all these sound good to me, and I’d have been pleased had we had *any* of them. I’m not necessarily saying there should be direct elections eventually, no. Maybe selection by the EP would be good enough. Maybe open, public selection by member states would be okay if the Commission President were elected or chosen by the EP. Dunno. I do know I want the EU to go in the general direction of more openness and democratic legitimacy. Being genuinely closer to citizens. Had there been more of that in the Constitution/Lisbon then I could have been really enthusiastic about it. I’d also have been impressed by any EU leader who’d said, after the 2005 referendums, that the project was broken and it had to be genuinely back to the drawing board.

You’ve still not actually answered my question, though, Robert. Do you want this intergovernmentalism in making these appointments, subject to things being “a bit more open”, or do you want something else?

You’d need to be more precise in how you want these appointments to be made, beyond talking about small steps. For example, should the roadmap be to firstly to have each candidate make a pitch that is publicly broadcast; next step to involve the EP in confirmation, then eventually to make it a EU wide decision of the people.

I think a lot of the problems with EU governance is the countries just seem to muddle through instead of making a clear statement of how they plan to achieve things.

As for the Queen. I’m now content for us to have a Queen, as is the modern practice elsewhere Europe, for instance in the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium and Spain. Let’s not assume the universal European standard is to be a republic.

The Queen has no real power; to replace her with an ex-politician would serve no real democratic purpose – what would the policies of an elected head of state be? How would we know who to vote for? – but it would involve a loss in that our head of state would then unnecessarily be a political figure rather than an apolitical one. The only importance of the monarch is at times of constitutional crisis involving a real risk to democracy – say, if a tyrannical party got a majority in the Commons and started legislating dictatorially. In those circumstances it might actually be an advantage to have an politically disinterested figure in place to defend constitutional integrity – as King Juan Carlos did in Spain in 1981.

Anyway, I don’t think it follows at all that if you think the EU should be more democratic, then you have to be republican.

And hang on a second, Robert – let me turn this back on you. You’re content to criticise Eurosceptics for their intergovernmentalism – fine. But are you actually defending this selection process against critics like me who are coming from a slightly different angle? Or do you actually agree with me, but simply object to hypocrisy?

In other words, an approach that excludes direct participation of the people and allows countries to ignore their international legal obligations whenever it suited them politically.

BTW I was thinking – the same eurosceptics say nothing about how the UK head of state is not even appointed by hereditary. Somehow that’s perfectly OK, possibly because they’re ‘British’.