How embarrassing …

Date: 25/09/1997

... The embarrassment of a misinvitation is nothing, however, compared with the Commission's flirtation with disaster as the raft of documents which accompanied its Agenda 2000 report were being printed on the eve of their publication in July.

At 10pm the night before the report was released, a sharp-eyed official noticed a terrible mistake - the figures for Bulgaria had been substituted with those for Romania.

The offending papers had to be torn out by hand. Given the complaints of those who were not selected for early talks, the incident could have been a public relations calamity.