Tony Blair will attempt to pick up the pieces when Britain assumes the European Union’s presidency next month, but President Chirac complicated that task yesterday by appointing Dominique de Villepin as his Prime Minister in place of Jean-Pierre Raffarin.

M de Villepin, whose heroes are Napoleon and Charles de Gaulle, is a staunch nationalist whose views are mostly anathema to Britain.

As Foreign Minister, he fought passionately to stop Britain and the US going to war in Iraq. He champions the state-led French social model over “Anglo-Saxon” economics.

Both M de Villepin and M Chirac promised to inject fresh life into the French economy, but the President emphasised that this would be “with total respect for the French model . . . This model is not one of the Anglo-Saxon type”.

Polls in the Netherlands showed the “yes” campaign trailing by 20 points, and even the most ardent supporters of the constitution admitted that it would be a “small miracle” if they win today. The European Commission and seven member states which have called referendums insisted that ratification would proceed regardless. But officials privately conceded that a second emphatic “no” from a founding member would probably prove fatal.

“There is a limit to what we can say before the Dutch vote. But things will change afterwards if they say ‘no’,” one Commission source admitted.

No country wants to be held responsible for killing the constitution by being first to abandon a referendum, but diplomats said that “everyone is talking to everyone” about how to proceed.

“We don’t want to be the first to say ‘no’. We won’t say ‘no’ unless there is a general decision not to go forward,” said one diplomat from a country which has promised a vote.

In Britain, two leading allies of the Prime Minister made clear that Mr Blair believes that it would be disastrous to try to revive the treaty.

Writing in The Times today, Stephen Byers, the former Transport Secretary and a close friend of Mr Blair, says that calls for another vote in France betray the sort of “institutional arrogance” that the French public rejected.

“By their decisive vote, the people of France have killed the European constitutional treaty,” he says. “It would be a grave mistake . . . to ignore or try to explain away this expression of popular feeling.”

Lord Kinnock of Bedwellty, the former Labour leader and EU commissioner, said that the period of reflection that Mr Blair had requested after the French vote “can only sensibly come to one conclusion . . . Referendums produce results and results have to be lived with.”

Officials said that Mr Byers and Lord Kinnock were both expressing their own views but they are unlikely to have spoken without consulting Mr Blair.

Jean-Claude Juncker, the Prime Minister of Luxembourg, who holds the EU presidency, will today start a round of meetings to try to find a way through the impasse before the June 16 summit of EU leaders. Mr Blair wants his fellow leaders to use the summit to find a way forward.

Britain is the only country not to have given a clear indication that it still intends to ratify the constitution. All the countries still due to hold referendums — Luxembourg, Ireland, Portugal, Poland, Denmark and the Czech Republic — insist that votes will go ahead.

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