A single-minded visionary… and public enemy number one in Britain for delivering the euro

Jacques Delors was short, bespectacled, earnest and bad-tempered – more local mayor (which he once was) than urbane, smooth French charmer, writes Chris Blackhurst. He was also a humanist, honest, and he could not be turned – ever

Foreign secretary Douglas Hurd, left, and prime minister John Major, centre, with Jacques Delors at the EC summit in Birmingham, in October 1992 (Steve Eason/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

All you need to know about Jacques Delors is that he turned down the offer to be prime minister of his own country because he decided he would rather be president of the European Commission.

The French president at the time, Francois Mitterrand, was all set to promote his fellow socialist minister of finance, in effect further propelling him towards one day becoming president of France, when Delors said he preferred the Brussels job instead. You can imagine the ridicule his decision would provoke, even now, in some quarters of Britain.

To many, it would confirm what they had long thought: that Delors, who has died at the age of 98, was a joke figure. After all, he was the target of one of the most memorable tabloid headlines, on the front page of The Sun on 1 November 1990: “Up Yours Delors.”