The truth is in the stuffing

A demonstrator protests in Luxembourg
against Turkey's possible entry to the EU.
Photograph: Gerard Cerles/AFP/Getty

If you were to rank the ultimate tabloid headlines, up there with the Sun’s Gotcha, and Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster would have to be the New York Daily News’ Ford To City: Drop Dead. Those five words, penned on the occasion US president Gerald Ford refused to bail New York out of its fiscal crisis, are a masterpiece of attitude and economy. There was almost an opportunity for something similar this morning if Vienna had succeed in its attempts to frustrate Turkish EU membership - Austria To Turkey: Get Stuffed.

That did not happen. Austria pulled back from its opposition after a day that saw over-running meetings and diplomatic wrangling. Carla Del Ponte, the UN war crimes prosecutor, advised that Austria’s ally Croatia was cooperating sufficiently with the Hague tribunal to allow its own membership talks to resume. But what will remain an unknown is the outcome of the pre-talk talks if the German election had produced a clearer result: If Angela Merkel, an opponent of Turkish EU membership, was the chancellor and someone other than soon-to-be-gone Joschka Fischer was conducting his country’s foreign policy.