The budget summit fiasco has left Poland feeling bitter that richer EU members particularly Britain, until now a close Polish ally were unwilling to be generous to the much poorer countries that entered the Union last year.

“We see it as a fault in national egoism in many countries,” Jaroslaw Pietras, Poland's European affairs minister, told the Financial Times, naming France, Britain and Germany as particularly guilty of being influenced by the short-term concerns of the voters at home instead of the long-term good of Europe.