Gordon Brown and Tony Blair secured backing from France last night for their stance that a return to a constitutional treaty “would not be possible”.

In an unprecedented move the two negotiated over the telephone with Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, before tomorrow’s EU summit in Brussels.

With Mr Brown inheriting any deal agreed by Mr Blair, the two have spent hours talking about Britain’s stance before the two-day gathering.

Last night they were together in a room in Downing Street as they held a conference call with Mr Sarkozy. A translator also took part in the conversation. Afterwards No 10 called the talks positive.

Blair casts himself as EU president candidate

Speaking on French TV, Tony Blair sang the praises of the EU and sketched his agenda for its future, all in fluent French

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Downing Street said that Mr Blair and Mr Brown had made it clear “we could accept no loss of control of key policy areas such as foreign policy, policing, taxation or social policy”.

It then added: “The three agreed that the UK and France should work closely together to help create an amending treaty and that a return to a constitutional treaty as rejected by France and Holland would not be possible.” Meanwhile, Britain secured several key presentational changes in the first draft of the EU treaty proposal last night, but it was clear that Mr Blair still had a fight on his hands at the summit.

The title of “EU foreign minister” will be dropped and replaced by a name that does not conflict with the titles of national representatives, although the job will remain, according to the proposals from the German EU presidency seen by The Times.

Mr Blair has surprised his fellow EU leaders by reopening the debate about the role of the powerful single EU foreign minister proposed in the failed EU constitution, rejected by voters in France and the Netherlands in 2005. The change of name is an important first step for Britain in limiting the new post’s powers, but Mr Blair will want to push for more substantial limits.

Importantly for Mr Blair, the draft document discussed last night by diplomats in Brussels proposed downgrading the EU constitution aim of stating the primacy of EU law by instead making it a “declaration”.

This move is likely to be claimed as a victory by the Government — but the European Court of Justice will continue to have precedence in those areas where powers have been clearly handed to the EU.

The Charter of Fundamental Rights — to which Britain objects — will be referred to by a cross-reference in the treaty that makes it legally binding, the draft stated.

Mr Blair has built his objections to the new EU treaty against the inclusion of the Charter of Fundamental Rights because it threatens to overrule British employment and social law in several areas, including an enhanced right to strike.

Although the continued determination of most EU countries to give it legal force means that is has been retained, experts said that the draft document could present an opportunity to change some of the wording in the charter to ensure that it does not conflict with British law.

In a Commons committee, Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, told a Tory MP that the Prime Minister would not accept that by setting out the four red lines he was accepting the other 490 pages of the constitution. Mrs Beckett said: “There is indeed a large core group of member states, particularly those who have ratified the treaty, who perfectly understandably do not really want to have to go back to their parliaments or to their electorates and say, by the way actually we are not going to do this any more in quite this way.

“Their approach has been [that] this is what we wanted to do, so can we save as much as possible . . . equally the French have been saying, the Dutch have been saying, we have been saying . . . the constitutional treaty is not going to return.”

Poland is likely to remain one of the main stumbling blocks to agreement later this week because the draft treaty framework does not propose reopening the distribution of voting weights for the 27 countries of the EU when it comes to making decisions. Instead, a footnote in the document points out that two member states — Poland and the Czech Republic — want to debate this at this week’s European Council. Poland is threatening to derail the whole treaty process unless it gets a bigger voting weight relative to Germany.

Earlier José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission President, also criticised Tony Blair’s plans to negotiate more opt-outs for Britain from a planned extension of qualified-majority voting for EU decision-making in justice, home affairs and social security policy. “Opt-out cannot be the rule in anything that wants to appear as a union,” he said.

“How can we Europeans convince the rest of the world when we speak about tackling climate change when we are not even able to agree on our own institutions.”

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