A HISTORIC summit on the future of Europe was about to begin last Friday and Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister who was chairing the talks, tried to leaven the atmosphere.

It was not a good moment, however, to tell a joke about being tossed from a helicopter: Leszek Miller, the Polish prime minister, was about to limp into the meeting. Just a few days earlier he had been seriously injured in a helicopter crash.

According to an aide who heard it, this was the joke that Berlusconi told: he and his wife were flying over a crowd of protesters when he said to her, “I could throw out one €10,000 note and make one person happy.” To which the pilot replied, “We could throw you out and make everyone happy.”

Berlusconi may have felt a little less like joking yesterday, even though he put a brave face on the collapse of the Brussels summit called to approve a constitution for the European Union. The breakdown crushed Berlusconi’s hopes of crowning in glory his stewardship of the EU’s rotating presidency.

The task of trying to settle seemingly unbridgeable differences over voting rights will now fall to the Irish, who take over the helm on January 1. Bertie Ahern, the Irish prime minister, warned that it might be several months before they even start negotiations.

In a foretaste of an emerging “two-speed Europe” that could leave Britain in the slow lane, Jacques Chirac, the French president, and Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor, responded to the failure in Brussels by warning that a “pioneer group” of countries could press ahead regardless with closer integration. The pair, backed by Belgium and Luxembourg, made it clear that others would be free to join them.

Their proposal nevertheless drew an angry reaction from Jose Maria Aznar, the Spanish prime minister. “I hope that no country will take measures to try to divide Europe,” he said. “If someone wants to act this way outside the treaties, they’ll have to explain themselves.”

Berlusconi, who earlier this year provoked a crisis in relations with Berlin by comparing a German MEP with a Nazi concentration camp guard, is not renowned for his diplomatic prowess. Yet not even Chirac, Schröder or Tony Blair could do anything about the recalcitrant Poles.

They torpedoed the meeting with their steadfast opposition to a change in the EU’s voting rules that would relegate them in the European pecking order.

The “Polish resistance”, as it was called, saved Britain the embarrassment, for once, of playing the odd man out in Europe, providing a useful diversion from Blair’s no less dogged battle to defend the national veto on foreign affairs and tax and the British budget rebate.

The summit’s failure has left those issues festering unhealthily on the domestic political agenda. Blair is facing growing calls, even from Labour backbenchers, to hold a referendum on any constitution ultimately agreed.

Spain had joined Poland in opposing the change in the voting rules, but while Aznar had expressed a willingness to compromise, Miller dug in his heels.

Much as he was admired by some for his refusal to be steamrollered by the bigger powers, the Polish leader’s stance was a maddening irritant for the Italians who would, no doubt, have preferred it if he had followed his doctor’s advice and stayed at home.

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