Short of giving him a pair of horns and a forked tail, it's hard to see how you could make the people who run institutional Europe dislike Declan Ganley more than they do now. Ganley is the British-born, multimillionaire Irish businessman who spoiled the European Union's party last June by spearheading a successful campaign to persuade Irish voters to reject the EU's Lisbon treaty. The Irish vote threw the EU into a state of organisational confusion from which it has not recovered to this day.

Now Libertas, Ganley's political movement, is putting up local candidates across the EU for next June's European Parliament elections. Ganley himself will stand for the constituency of Ireland North West. It is clear that Libertas will run a highly populist campaign - in one recent statement, it attacked a European Parliament decision to "go ahead with building a €9m gym and pool in Brussels which only MEPs and parliament staff can access... The move to go ahead with it while families across the EU are facing financial hardship shows a complete lack of respect for the people of Europe."