I burnt some Air Miles at the weekend and went to Geneva – one of Europe’s duller cities.

I immediately boarded a train for Northern Italy. The spectacular train was spot on time, incredibly clean and very fast. The man at the bar cooked fresh pasta, and the two-and–a-half hour journey was gone in a spellbinding flash, through the rock and snow of the Alps, until finally the tunnels and gorges gave way to the wide stretches of Lake Maggiore.

The lake boasts several islands – Isola Bella sports an outrageous over-the-top rococo palace that seems to have engulfed every square inch of land; but Pescatori is a dream of a place.

A narrow passage threads down the spine of the island, with shops, houses, and cafes looking out onto the water either side. You can walk right round the island in nine minutes.

The foul north wind howled across the lake, the temperature never exceeded 13 degrees, and the water was eternally choppy – bombarded from time to time by tropical downpours. Past mid-summer’s day is this global warming – those lower temperatures provoked by the melting arctic?

Flying home on a packed British Airways flight I thought again of the Switzerland I had spent but a few hours in.

I thought how easy it is to leave non-EU Swiss territory and enter the EU with no border checks – a perfunctory wander through the train by a Swiss immigration man aboard the train on the way back from Italy.

He got off at the next station after the border. No one checked my passport either into or out of the EU until I got to Geneva airport.

None of the wretched checks for liquids at Geneva (although the Swiss airports do maintain the need for such checks) – I have snowblogged on this matter before – particularly the inconsistency and the illogicality of he “liquids search” render them little short of a farce.

But nothing can detract from the beauty of Northern Italy, and Lake Maggiore in particular.

So McDonald’s has pulled out of Iceland.

The ultimate economic indicator of ruin is struck, with the closure of three fast food outlets on the island and an indication from the multinational that they don’t expect to return.

Iceland hopes to make good by swallowing something even more indigestible than a reindeer burger – membership of the EU. And it is not the presidency of the European Union that excites them, but the prospect that the island with a ‘c’ in its name can mimic the economic rescue the EU has extended to the member island with an ‘r’ in its name – Ireland.

Speaking of the presidency, I’m told by my Parisian informant that France continues to “decelerate” rapidly on backing Tony Blair for the job. But the problem remains “if not Tony, who?”

The Lisbon Treaty specifically outlaws any candidate from Reykjavik. The candidate for the presidency has to have held high office in a member state.

The race is on therefore – not for Icelandic membership, but to sign the treaty into law and immediately appoint the European Union’s first president.

The Shadow Foreign Secretary, William Hague, says Tony Blair will be appointed “over my dead body”.

Downing Street is already denying that Gordon Brown has tapped up a couple of civil servants to lobby for Blair’s candidacy. One certainly wonders whether if is this had happened, it would represent an acceptable use of tax payers’ money.

In any case, as I blogged here last week, Blair is NOT a candidate.

He has merely let it be known that he will have to be asked, and if asked has indicated he would serve.

Even as we speak, Blair must be weighing up whether to leave matters quite like this. How many lectures could be launched upon a reputation as the man who was rejected from becoming Europe’s first ever president in a contest in which there was no known opponent?

If I am wrong, and Blair gets the job, there will be no more high earning lectures anyway, for a bit.

But then we don’t yet know quite what sort of an expenses and “outside earnings” regime the new president is expected to enjoy.

Wow… that lit the blue touch paper! Or was it red? What on earth has Tony Blair done to ignite such bile? The party he led was handsomely re-elected in a campaign he led, he did not shy away from the issues, the country reportedly expressed confidence in him. How can the worm turn so fast?

Snowblog reveals the simple truth that the European presidency is slipping away from Mr Blair, and invective cascades – indeed I think I’m right in saying that the reaction to the blog is proving more numerous, and angrier, than any that I have posted. I notice Martin entering a small plea for the former prime minister, but for the rest there is an intriguing unison.

What has Tony Blair done? And given the treatment to which Gordon Brown has been subjected – some of which he has encouraged, some of which has been inflicted – why has there been no call for Blair to come back?

Is it the reported £15m (a figure that beggars my belief) that others have claimed he has made since stepping down? Is it something those close to him have done? Is it his performance as “Middle East envoy“?

And how is it that this reaction charted here is at such odds with the regard Mr Blair is held in the United States and elsewhere (until recently in France, Spain and other European countries)?

Somehow, despite being re-elected whilst British troops were still holed up in an airbase in Basra, is it simply that the enormity of Iraq has come back to haunt Tony Blair?

I regret that this Snowblog represents a cascade of questions, but how is it that one of the most popular and most elected prime ministers of our age is, within just four years, reduced to this?

And what will history say of him?

The presidency of Europe is slipping rapidly from Tony Blair’s hands.

My sources in Brussels and elsewhere report a rapid sea change in the former prime minister’s fortunes as ratification of the Lisbon treaty creeps closer (the Czech president could reluctantly sign it within a week).

Those sources tell me that Blair’s candidacy has been hit heavily by the opening of the Iraq inquiry.

European leaders are now horrified at the thought that the EU’s first president could find himself almost immediately under very heavy public scrutiny at a formal inquiry into the Iraq war.

The “blood on your hands” incident at the St Paul’s cathedral memorial service last week added to the misgivings. The idea that assorted families might continue to accuse Europe’s president of having blood on his hands does not appeal to those who have to make the decision as to who should become the European Union’s figurehead.

But the message has also been heard loud and clear in the European Council that for Mr Blair to become president will have no positive effect on Britain’s attitude to the union. Indeed, diplomats are warning them that the effect might even be dramatically negative.

Coupled with the belief that a Conservative government may take power in Britain next year, the thought of a Tory euro sceptic prime minister at loggerheads with an erstwhile Labour prime minister does not attract.

I am told that Mr Blair’s candidacy, which once looked a shoe-in at 90-10, has slipped this month to well under 50 “and still on the slide”.

At the same time, there is increasing talk that the best candidate for the other job on offer, that of high representative for foreign affairs – a potentially more important job than the presidency itself – could be offered to Britain’s foreign secretary, David Miliband, whose ratings in Europe have been in the ascendancy for the past six months.

Mr Blair, on the other hand, does have one fervent supporter: the man whose house guest he was on several occasions during his premiership, Silvio Berlusconi. And with friends like Berlusconi…

In fairness to Mr Blair, as far as he is concerned he has never been a candidate. The understanding he has left with the European Council is that if they want him, they must ask him – and he will probably accept.

My information is that he is increasingly unlikely to be asked.

The EU President Jose Manuel Barroso is a boundless optimist.

Most of our intersection yesterday was satisfactorily off the record. I say “satisfactorily” because, of course, you learn far more, and can eventually drip-feed what you learn subtly into succeeding perspectives as the months go by.

But what I did learn whilst I was at the EC’s headquarters here in London was that they fear that the next European elections will throw up many more politicians from the political extremes.

There is anyway a widespread belief, both here and in Europe, that the UKIP phenomenon (passionately anti-European) is all but dead. To quote one correspondent in Brussels, they have been “a complete shambles”.

The expectation here is that the BNP could take three or four of their seats, and the rest, if current trends continue, would largely go to the Tories.

Interestingly, I learnt that David Cameron has been to the commission in Brussels more times than any other European aspiring premier – this despite the fact that he is said to cut something of a euro-sceptical demeanour.

There is a sense, too, that Ireland will eventually vote FOR the Lisbon treaty because Irish sentiment currently believes that Ireland inside the euro has fared much better than poor old Iceland out of it.

According to the Europeans, the one word that seems to sum up the central requirement from the G20 summit on 2 April is “confidence”. So anything less than big commitments on how to resolve the present crisis will be seen as failure and will damage confidence.

We are busy constructing a confidence thermometer, even as I speak.