"ISN'T it the truth that you are now so desperate to extricate yourself from this mess that you will settle for anything? There is humiliation in this deal. There is ignominy in this deal. In fact it is, not a deal at all, it is a rout."
Mr John Major flew off to the Florence summit last night with Mr Tony Blair's withering indictment ringing in his ears - and after a warning from Mr Paddy Ashdown that the emerging agreement over the ban on British beef presented the Prime Minister with "an exceedingly dangerous moment".
The Liberal Democrat leader declared: "It is now clear that the Prime Minister's gamble of adopting a policy of confrontation with Europe is going to prove an expensive failure." Mr Ashdown claimed Britain would be asked to cull up to another 67,000 cows and would be monitored by Brussels to make sure it stuck to the proposed framework.
He warned that the emerging agreement contained no start date, timetable, clear phases or binding promises of reciprocal action from the EU.
But during angry exchanges in the Commons, Mr Major suggested the lifting of the ban would begin in the early autumn. And he and other ministers maintained the proposed deal did not involve massive additional slaughter.
A Downing Street spokesman insisted that most of the cows involved were due to be culled under the rule preventing cows over 30 months old entering the food chain, and said they were talking about "clapped out old milkers". Mr Michael Heseltine, the Deputy Prime Minister, outraged Opposition MPs by insisting that a marginal increase involved only a "handful of cows".
The National Farmers Union has put the numbers involved at an estimated 66,000.
Mr Major told Mr Blair he hoped to complete the agreement during the Florence summit. Thereafter it would be for Britain, not the Commission, to determine the dates because ft would depend on the steps Britain had to take, he said.
But Mr Blair put it to him that "the question isn't when it (the lifting of the ban) will begin but when it will end." And Mr Blair pressed him: "There is no date in this deal. There are no guarantees, indeed any part of the ban being lifted has to be referred to a committee under no obligation to accept it. You have had to concede extra cattle to be slaughtered, though there is no scientific basis for it. There is no lifting of the third country ban.
"There is no deal on additional compensation, though we will be spending billions on it for years to come. If those points in that deal are correct, isn't calling it a triumph an utter travesty of the truth?"