THE “father” of the European constitution, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, paused to savour the irony of France’s revolt against his baby.

“If France votes ‘no’, that might encourage a British ‘yes’. The British might then say, ‘Now we can take the lead in Europe’,” he mused to The Times.

Aged 79, aristocratic and utterly self-assured, the former French President is the embodiment of why his country is split ahead of Sunday’s referendum on the EU treaty. Yesterday’s polls indicated that 53 per cent are preparing to vote “non”.

Monsieur le President, as he is known in Chamalières, the Giscard fiefdom in the Auvergne highlands, is the grand technocrat who ensured that France boxed above its weight when he presided over the two-year Brussels Convention that produced what he baptised a constitution. “The British wanted to call it a charter, but in the modern world when states organise themselves we call it a constitution,” he said.

For France’s disaffected voters, however, M Giscard is also the very model of an arrogant governing caste that has “imposed” Europe on the people by stealth.

“We don’t want their kind of Europe,” cry the largely left- voting recalcitrants, and also those of the Far Right who see the Giscard constitution as the spur for a “salutory no” against an EU that threatens the French nation.

Switching into English, M Giscard said: “The opposition is a compilation of extremes that are incoherent. The critics are stirring up fears about everything that is not in the constitution.”

He could not resist a swipe at his bête noire of the past 26 years: Jacques Chirac, M Giscard’s Prime Minister before they feuded in 1976, had left it too late to start explaining the constitution to France, he said. Above all, French leaders of Right and Left had failed to make people understand that Europe has long had a market economy.

“The people are worried that the system goes too far in the direction of the Anglo-Saxons — that this excessive ‘liberalism’ is endangering their conditions of work and life. That is just wrong. The constitution takes no step in [that] direction and its economic model remains the European one of the social market,” he said.

VGE, as he is sometimes known, has been criss-crossing France for weeks; not campaigning, he says, but explaining why it would be folly to jettison the treaty he managed to tailor partly in France’s image.

Don’t read the long and boring Part Three of the treaty, he tells audiences with a smile of complicity. All that matters are the short preliminary articles — “the little text that we wrote”, which set out the Union’s goals.

If people read that France would have been spared its current psychodrama, fuelled by what the critics have unearthed in the sprawling Part Three, he said.

This was merely a compilation of existing treaties that the member states, not the constitution drafters, had included as a tidying-up exercise.

The latest polls show that the French “no” vote is between 6 and 8 points ahead. The pollster IPSOS found that 53 per cent of voters would reject the treaty, compared with 47 per cent in favour. IFOP said that 54 per cent were against and 46 per cent in favour.

The “no” camp’s hostility has largely been prompted by the restatement of long-extant commitments to unbiased free trade and movement of people and services. “What is really funny is that if we reject the constitution, the only bit that stays in force is this third part, because it is not new and already in past treaties,” he told an audience at Chamalières.

In this prosperous suburb of Clermont-Ferrand, VGE was on safe ground as he explained the constitution to 400 local people, most middle-class and middle-aged. Alongside him sat his son, Louis, 45, who succeeded his centre-right father as the local MP and who last week became mayor of Chamalières, also one of M Giscard’s jobs until he became President in 1974. The proud father delights in addressing Louis with Gallic formality as “Monsieur le Député (MP), Maire de Chamalières”.

The loud applause for the father and son’s appearance was matched by that which greeted M Giscard’s most politically incorrect belief: that Turkey must never be admitted to the EU. It would be nonsense to introduce a largely Asian, Muslim state into the EU, making it the most politically powerful and poorest member. That argument is useful for the “yes” campaign.

M Giscard is convinced that France will approve “his” constitution on Sunday, but concedes the possibility that voters will dump the project initiated by EU leaders in December 2001. “There is not the slightest possibility of renegotiating it. Do not be fooled,” he told the crowd.

• Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the Prime Minister, ruled out a second referendum on the EU constitution should voters reject it. “I do not believe the prospect of a second referendum is something that France can accept,” he told the BBC’s Hardtalk programme. “There will be no second round, no second chance. France will speak once and once it has spoken, its message is clear.”

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