Gordon Brown lavished praise on the European Union yesterday at the start of a world tour aimed at building support in the run-up to next week’s G20 summit in London.

In the most pro-European speech he has yet delivered, the Prime Minister said he was proud that the Lisbon Treaty had been ratified by Britain and described the EU as a “beacon of hope for the whole world”. Britain, he said, was "not in Europe’s slipstream but in its mainstream”.

Acknowledging that he had a reputation as an occasional opponent of Brussels, Mr Brown justified his new enthusiasm, saying Europe had a chance to command the world stage. The EU is “uniquely placed to lead” efforts to create a new economic consensus, he said, as he appealed for support for the “biggest fiscal stimulus the world has ever agreed” to address the global recession.

Just a few weeks after praising the “irrepressible spirit” of the US, Mr Brown travelled to Strasbourg to address the European Parliament in what aides acknowledged was a deliberate echo of his speech to Congress. He said that he had spoken to President Obama and urged his audience to seize a “great opportunity” of a “new era of heightened co-operation between Europe and America”.

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“Never in recent years have we had an American leadership so keen at all levels to cooperate with Europe on financial stability, climate change, security and development, and seldom has such cooperation been so obviously of benefit to us and all the world,” he said.

Mr Brown’s aides acknowledged that efforts to win support for economic action before the G20 also served a domestic political purpose - on the day a Conservative MEP defied David Cameron’s plans to leave the centre-Right but federalist EPP grouping in the European parliament. Christopher Beazley, Conservative MEP for East of England, announced he was refusing to leave the grouping ahead of a June deadline set by Mr Cameron. "I am terribly sad but I cannot watch my country head for the rocks, which it will do if Cameron becomes Prime Minister and has no allies in the major governments of the European Union."

Despite his praise for the EU, however, Mr Brown did not enjoy an entirely warm reception to his speech. Joseph Daul, a French MEP and the chairman of the EPP, lectured Mr Brown on his use of the phrase “British jobs for British workers”, saying the rhetoric risked “picking a scab on the wound of dangerous nationalism”. Mr Daul is a political ally of the French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

The rebuff followed Mr Brown’s by-now familiar warnings against protectionism, aimed in part at French subsidies that reward the relocation of car factories from eastern Europe to France.

British officials travelling with the Prime Minister justified his five-day trip that will include visits to New York, Brazil and Chile, saying it was important to build a consensus before the London G20 summit on April 2. At the same time, however, they downplayed expectations that the meeting would result in immediate action. “The test of it will be what happens in the following months,” said one. “We are not expecting countries to use the summit to make domestic announcements.”

In response to Angela Merkel’s reluctance to commit to further cash injections, an official said the German Chancellor was downplaying the size of the stimulus for “domestic political purposes”. He added: “The G20 is about much much more than German fiscal policy.”

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