Gordon Brown yesterday denied claims that he was "on the back foot" over Europe as he insisted the European Union agenda was moving on from institutional wrangling to a more Anglo-Saxon programme of adapting the bloc to succeed in an era of globalisation.

The prime minister's late arrival at an EU treaty signing in Lisbon on Thursday was still reverberating around an EU summit in Brussels yesterday. It was widely seen as a snub, prompting Peter Mandelson, EU trade commissioner, to claim Mr Brown had downgraded Europe as a priority.