I suppose it’s still the silly season, and even the broadsheets — which seem to shrink by the day, as the Guardian becomes the latest quality daily to announce it’s going tabloid (or 'Berliner', to be precise) — are scrabbling around for stories. An article in the Times today takes a brief remark from President Barroso, the kind of remark that might normally have made a two-line story on page 30, and constructed a vast, hyperbolic exegesis about the death of the constitution from it, complete with tabloid-style interpretations of to “startling admissions” and “genocide stalking the Continent”.

The Guardian also jumped on board:

The last rites were finally delivered to the European Union constitution yesterday when Jose Manuel Barroso, the commission president, declared that there were “no magic formulae” to revive the measure. …This is the first time that a European leader has all but declared the constitution dead. … Arch-federalists… will be disappointed.

Talk about making mountains out of molehills! What Barroso actually said was that he couldn’t see a “magic formula” for reviving the constitution, which is quite different from saying that there’s no possible way ahead; and that there will be no new constitution in the near future, which is quite different from saying that EU reform is now impossible. On top of that, Barroso’s remarks carry no official weight anyway, since the European Commission has no say in what EU countries choose to do regarding the constitution.

In other words, the Guardian and the Times are engaging in some rather irresponsible hype, following the very British trend of ramming nails into coffins before the coroners have even given their verdicts.