Brussels blog (Tony Barber): One of the pleasures of the Czech Republic's forthcoming presidency of the European Union will be to watch in action a thoughtful, humorous, bow-tied 71-year-old who rejoices in the name of Karl Johannes Nepomuk Josef Norbert Friedrich Antonius Wratislaw Mena, prince of Schwarzenberg. Karel Schwarzenberg, as he is better known, has served as the Czech foreign minister for the past two years, and I caught up with him over breakfast.

An old friend of Vaclav Havel, the philosopher-playwright who became the Czech head of state after the anti-communist Velvet Revolution of 1989, Schwarzenberg will have the task of keeping the Czech ship on a steady course at a time when quite a few other EU countries are worried about how Prague will handle its six months in the hot seat. Schwarzenberg is diplomatic elegance personified but, as with Havel, that doesn't mean he's afraid to speak his mind.