Back at the bank after one of these meetings, Tommaso, visibly irritated by the lack of progress, asked me to come into his office. When we got there he told me that we had to start the preparatory work for the European Council ourselves – “Nobody else will do it.” I had no clue what the work would involve.
But in his view it was quite simple. The main outcome of the European Council was a statement mandating the intergovernmental conference to change the Treaty to allow for monetary union, the so-called Council Conclusions. We had to write a first draft of these Council Conclusions, even if the meeting was four months away. “Three pages, no more!” he told us.