Most of us have difficulty finding constitutional significance in a kilo of brisket. Some Euro parliamentarians do not. If we see as a decent meal what to Strasbourg MEPs is a political icon, the scope for constructive discussion must be limited. Sure enough, the row over the Government's handling of successive BSE crises has subsided into a silly squabble about who should talk to whom. The Euro MPs who claim to have uncovered abuses of power and public trust by Agriculture Minister Douglas Hogg, some of his officials and others in the European Commission, say Hogg should be dragged before them to explain himself. The minister denies any such obligation, and the Commission seems to agree. A genuine constitutional issue is involved: the Strasbourg parliament wants to strengthen its position in the EU power structure. But the MEPs chose their battleground badly, because Hogg could use their principles to dress up an effortlessly successful rebuttal of what to him was only a minor challenge anyway. All the parliamentarians have done is hand an easy political victory to a previously weak minister and deflected attention from the question of whether Whitehall and Brussels misled or even endangered the public by their BSE control strategies. Neither is it clear how much that question matters any more. Every meat company executive can tell his own story of seeing bureaucratic bumbling and duplicity during the decade and more of BSE disasters. Yet the industry no longer has much interest in recriminations; it wants to get on with the mundane business of re-establishing stability in the production system, the distribution chain and the end market. Ironically, the MEPs have helped. By choosing to fight on principles, they let Douglas Hogg apologise for past misdemeanours as a footnote while making headlines with rhetoric having little meaning in this country. From the industry's viewpoint, the benefit is a food minister now obliged to get back to the useful politics of the possible, leaving the politics of posturing in Strasbourg. {{NEWS}}