David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, was humiliated by the Prime Minister yesterday when he was forced to remove pro-European passages from a speech and drop his policy initiative on European defence.

Gordon Brown’s intervention, hours before Mr Miliband was due to speak in Bruges, again demonstrated the willingness by the Prime Minister to overrule his ministers at short notice, as well as having a more cautious attitude towards Europe.

Mr Brown ordered Mr Miliband to drop explicit references to an “EU military capabilities charter”, which would have identified targets for investment, research and training.

The idea would have aligned Britain with plans from President Sarkozy of France to beef up Europe’s shared defence forces and set out a blueprint for the future deployment and equipping of troops from the 27 member states working together. However, in questions after the speech, Mr Miliband moved even more decisively away from the position of Mr Sarkozy, who wants a common EU defence.

Mr Miliband said: “Let’s not have impetus to duplicate the work that is done either by Nato or nation states in a new European institution. Let’s get on with using the institutions we have got to make progress.”

The Prime Minister also insisted that Mr Miliband drop a passage mentioning Europe’s “ability to set standards for the rest of the world”, and a passage saying that Europe could become a “model power” was changed to “model regional power”.

At one point the briefing suggested that he would talk about enlarging the single market to Africa. In the final speech, he refers to a free trade zone for “the countries of the Mahgreb”.

The differences came to light after Mr Miliband’s special adviser e-mailed journalists a two-page briefing the night before, containing advance passages of the speech. The final text, which was delivered yesterday, varied sharply from the first version.

Downing Street confirmed yesterday that the Prime Minister had seen the speech and discussed its contents with the Foreign Secretary, but a source close to Mr Miliband denied that he had been overruled at the last minute over its language and content.

The source said that the substance of the speech did not change and that the military capability review had been long mooted in other Whitehall departments.

Many of the changes suggest that Mr Brown is more sceptical about Europe’s chances of achieving change than Mr Miliband. In the original version, sent out on Wednesday night, Mr Miliband was to due to say: “Europe must step into this void. There is a clear fork in the road . . . Face losing our hard power by not being prepared to intervene. Face losing our soft power by closing off further enlargement and a bolder near neighbourhood policy.”

But in the version he delivered in Bruges, he said: “Europe has the chance to help fill this void. There is a clear choice . . . Fail to combine hard and soft power, the disciplines and benefits of membership with the ability to make a difference beyond our border.”

Mr Miliband’s aim in the speech had been to slay the “demons” of Euroscepticism that he said haunted Margaret Thatcher’s speech in Bruges 19 years ago. Ironically, chief among the five key principles of Britain’s role in Europe set out by Mrs Thatcher was building up the capacity of Nato to co-ordinate Europe’s defence — the same message that, eventually, was given by Mr Miliband.

War of words

— When Margaret Thatcher was invited to speak in Bruges on the subject of Britain and Europe, she said it must seem like “inviting Genghis Khan to speak on the virtues of peaceful coexistence”

— La Stampa, the Italian newspaper, said she was like “an elephant in the china shop of Europe” and a German paper described the speech as doing “more damage to the idea of a unified Europe than Hurricane Gilbert did to property in Jamaica”

— The speech challenged the vision of Jacques Delors, the European Commission President, of a Europe moving towards union. It said: “Europe will be stronger because it has France as France, Spain as Spain, Britain as Britain”

Source: College of Europe, Times archives, Bruges Group

Times Recommends

• Mourinho wants to go ‘home’ to England
• Worship of children has gone too far
• 100 best winter wines