My road in Dulwich is regularly patrolled by a brace of foxes, but they never show signs of wanting to climb on anything except a bin and eachother.What intrigues me about the bitten-baby story is the insistence of a chap called Trevor Williams, of the Fox Project, that the child’s injuries “are totally inconsistent with a fox-bite… They sound much more like a cat’s scratch.” So, let me get this straight, Inspector. When the Norbury fox was found sitting on the scratched baby, it didn’t mean the fox was responsible for the scratches; it meant a cat had done the evil deed, then scarpered leaving the fox holding, as it were, the smoking gun.. Bloody hell. Non-operational greylag geese, innocent fall-guy foxes and infanticidal pussies Time to call in Redmond O’Hanlon….

The most telling moment in the aftermath of this week’s European Court Judgment upholding the 48-hour week was the Commons intervention of the criminal barrister Sir Ivan Lawrence. Lawrence is a rock-solid and belligerent MP of the old Tory right. He’s a populist, all right, but he isn’t on the extreme edge of Europhobia by Tory standards He wasn’t, for example, a whipless rebel. Yet he suggested that Europe should be told that “if we are not to get fair play .. we are prepared to leave the European Union”. If he had said that five years ago, it would have caused a sensation On this occasion there wasn’t even a murmur of protest. If nothing else, Lawrence’s excitable response is a reminder of just how euphoric his backbenchers – and his super-fickle supporters among Tory editors and proprietors – are now that John Major has a tailor-made European issue to be tough about. It unites the Tory party because it strikes at its ideologically non-interventionist heart.
The Prime Minister has a real case, which is that the 48-hour directive was forced through as a Health and Safety measure simply in order to avoid the British veto.

It is far from mere fantasy to suppose that he can secure, as part of the inter-governmental negotiations on the EU’s future, a political decision that will in effect reverse the court judgment. In short, and in contrast to the miserable episode of BSE for which Douglas Hogg bore the parliamentary brunt in an Opposition censure debate in the Commons yesterday, he could actually win.What’s more the 48-hour week has provided a casus belli, when the IGC threatened to be rather free of others in the run-up to the election. The Foreign Office view, for some time, has been that Britain’s EU partners would try to avoid showdowns with Major in the run-up to the election, precisely because they feared that Labour would simply follow them into whatever Euro-sceptic trench the Prime Minister chose to inhabit. And that if they did, it would be all the more difficult for Tony Blair to do deals if and when he won the election.

Here, by contrast, was an issue on which Tony Blair could not fail, because of Labour’s natural constituency, to play the pro-European card and so open up clear water between himself and the Tories. And in the process break his own campaign rules by alienating newspapers like the Sun and the Daily Mail which so fulsomely praised Major yesterday.But is this a threat or an opportunity for Labour? Blair can defend the 48-hour measure on its own merits without buying into the whole employee protection agenda now threatened by the EU social affairs commissioner Padraig Flynn. But the 48-hour issue may also prove a watershed.Those close to Tony Blair strongly deny it, but there have been distinct signs of a muting of Labour’s pro-European rhetoric over the past few months Take EMU, for example. Robin Cook, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, surfaces from time to time and gives strong and lightly coded indications that he is against going into the single currency in the first wave – though not with such vehemence that he would have to resign if it happened Gordon Brown gets a bit cross behind the scenes. But the headlines stick, especially in an approving Euro-sceptic press, and the impression is allowed to run that Labour wouldn’t go in during the first wave. Labour might well not go in a first wave, though there is no sign that Tony Blair has made up his mind on the issue.