I was up early again this morning to get the Eurostar to London. I took a day off to go and interview Horst Reichenbach, who is now a Vice-President of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development but was Director General of the European Commission’s DG Administration 1999-2004 and was therefore a key player in the Kinnock reform process. I needed to interview him because I am currently working on an update of my 2001 biography of Neil Kinnock. The first edition only touched on the beginning of the reform process, but now I can treat Neil’s political career in the round. The more I look into the Kinnock reform package the more I realise what an achievement it was to get the whole thing through. An academic friend, Hussein Kassim, tellingly wrote an article entitled “‘Mission impossible’, but mission accomplished: the Kinnock reforms and the European Commission,’ that just about sums it up (published in the Journal of European Public Policy, 15:5 August 2008). There is no doubt that the Commission was lucky to have a seasoned reformer like Kinnock to take the whole thing on and brilliant officials like Horst Reichenbach and Philip Lowe (who I saw a few weeks back) to help him deliver. Reichenbach had also already got one reform process under his belt, having reformed DG Consumer Policy and Health Protection in the 1997-’99 period, after the findings of the European Parliament’s Temporary Committee of Inquiry into the BSE crisis. And Philip Lowe had previously spent time reforming DG Development and creating DG Aidco. Indeed, one of Reichenbach’s theses was that the success of the reform process owed a lot to a series of coincidences, as well as to the combined force of their networks of contacts…