Andy McSmith: Our reinvented PM may have a little surprise for doubting Gordon

A new magazine has dropped on to my desk. It is aimed at readers much younger than I am. Politics, according to the first editorial statement from Spinoff, is "boring and, frankly, about as much use as a monk's cock". This is, believe it or not, an attempt to instil in the young the idea that, really, politics matters and is not all boring.

Good luck to them, and in a similar spirit I shall try to engage your interest in an institution duller by far than the British Parliament, and which often proves to be as flaccid as a member in a monastery, but which will affect you for the rest of your life – namely, the European Union.

There was a gathering in Athens last week to mark an event of incomparable importance, the accession of another 10 countries, turning the 15-member EU, which was complicated enough, into a frighteningly bloated 25. The conference was to have been only a signing ceremony, but the Greeks and French insisted on using it to discuss some business overlooked during the Iraq war. Afterwards, the EU leaders gathered for a happy family photograph, which was considered undeserving of publication by most of the British press because Tony Blair was not in it.

Not much has happened in the years since the Prime Minister promised to take us into the "heart of Europe", not much to make us feel any more European than we used to be. In particular, John Major bequeathed Tony Blair the option of not joining the European single currency – an option he has exercised for six years so far, and may continue to exercise for many years to come.

There has, admittedly, been a change in mood. We now treat our EU partners less like a bunch of conspirators with rapacious designs on our national sovereignty, and more like people who could be good business partners if only they were as wise and courageous as we are. This new spirit of engagement produced one notable result, when Blair agreed to participate in a common European defence policy, an idea that is anathema to the right wing of the Tory party.

We are informed that the common defence policy is not dead. On the contrary, it is about to take tangible form, when an EU peacekeeping force arrives in Macedonia under the command of a French general. Well, fine, but if a common defence policy means anything, it surely means that all members act together when any are perceived to be under threat. Britain has just fought a war to avert what Tony Blair claimed was a threat to the lives of EU citizens, when half the heads of government of the EU disputed that the threat existed. If the union cannot agree on whether it is under attack, it is difficult to see how it can have a common policy for defending itself.

Since hard evidence of this disputed Arab threat has not yet emerged from the rubble of Iraq, you might wonder whether the Prime Minister or Jack Straw went to Athens looking as if they had some explaining to do. Not at all. They were in ebullient form. In their minds, they had been vindicated, the French had been proved wrong, and on to next business.

Next business included shooting down a proposition from Valérie Giscard d'Estaing that the President of the European Commission might be elected rather than picked by horse-trading between national governments, and giving equally short shrift to his half-formed idea for a congress of EU national parliaments.

Blair did, however, agree that there should be an elected president of the EU (a different animal from the President of the Commission). It is rumoured that he fancies the job for himself – but that is just a rumour. His points made, he departed without waiting for the family photograph, too busy or too tired to hang around.

This week, the Prime Minister will have to focus on Europe again, when he sits down for a long chat with Gordon Brown, over whether the UK should join the euro. The Chancellor will come armed with the Treasury's study into whether the UK economy has sufficiently converged with those of euroland to make it feasible to call a referendum. He is expected to warn that the time is not ripe, and Blair is expected to defer to his Chancellor. The best that supporters of the euro are hoping for is an announcement that the referendum has been put off for six months or a year, rather than for the duration of this Parliament.

But others who know the Prime Minister well think he might go for it, believing that he can turn public opinion in a referendum campaign, just as he appears to have pulled opinion around in favour of the Iraq war. He hinted as much when he told The Sun: "If the argument is right it is your duty to take the risk."

That Blair is prepared to play rough with other EU leaders occasionally is not, of itself, evidence that he is disillusioned with the European project. Ken Clarke was notorious for leaving behind smashed crockery after his visits to Europe when he was a minister in the Thatcher government, because he believed in the EU and wanted it to work. Similarly, Blair's practice of teaming up with Italy's Silvio Berlusconi and Spain's Jose Maria Aznar shows that he, too, wants it to work, on his own rather right-wing terms.

There will never be universal agreement among the experts as to whether the UK and euroland economies have converged. Earlier this year, I went to a debate on the subject organised by Bloomberg, between Michael Howard and Peter Mandelson. It was lively, but it was a dialogue of the deaf. Mandelson believed, for political reasons, that we should be in the euro, while Howard believed the opposite, and they each marshalled whatever economic data supported their respective cases.

That evening's "neutral" voice, an economic adviser to HSBC, Stephen King, produced graphs to support a thesis that while the UK is out of step with euroland as whole, it is in step with 11 of its 12 economies, if you exclude Germany. Apparently, the Germans should have kept the mark, while sterling should be in the euro.

This only illustrates that in the end it will be a political decision whether the time for a referendum is ripe or not. A notorious facet of political time is that when left to ripen, it rots. Now that Tony Blair believes he has rediscovered himself as a leader ready to risk his job and take on public opinion to do what he thinks is right, perhaps he could surprise us all by telling his Chancellor that the time for a referendum is now.