We keep getting EU announcements that don’t last the night.

Last week’s last-ditch summit to save the euro apparently didn’t.

So it’s back to the drawing board and yet more ‘make-or-break’ meetings dragging on into the night. And presumably more announcements that the solution had been found.

Stephen Fidler listed on The Wall Street Journal five ‘facts’ about the last summit that after all turn out to be untrue:

• That David Cameron’s veto prevented powers from being relinquished from London to Brussels: The proposal intended to allow eurozone member countries, and any other government that chose to follow the same rules, to coordinate more tightly their budgets and government debts and to be subject to near-automatic discipline if they did not comply. There was never any question of the UK being subject to these rules.

• Britain was seeking an opt-out from EU regulation on financial services: the nearest thing to a proposed opt-out, according to Mats Persson from the euro-sceptic think tank Open Europe, was an effort to secure exemption from some EU regulations for businesses, such as for instance hedge-fund managers from outside the EU that only operate in one country.

• Britain was seeking to block a financial-transactions tax: the UK already has a veto on this.

• Britain was seeking weaker regulation for its banks: on the contrary, it wanted the freedom to impose tougher capital requirements on UK banks.

• President Nicolas Sarkozy was very angry about Cameron’s behaviour: he may have pretended to be, argued author and commentator David Marsh, but Mr Cameron helped him out of a tight spot: France never wanted a treaty enforced by the Commission and the European Court of Justice such as Germany wanted.

• Britain is now adrift from the rest of the EU: Mr Cameron’s tactics do not appear to have been very effective – he burned political capital for nothing. But the UK will still be involved in the discussions: for instance it will still be invited to the summit due in late January to discuss progress. It is not, after all, in British interests to undermine the eurozone when seven out of Britain’s top 10 export markets are in the eurozone; eurozone borrowers owe British banks more than $1 trillion, according to the Bank of England, with borrowers in France leading at $292 billion.

The first draft of a new treaty meant to tighten economic governance in eurozone countries was circulated on Friday with the aim to have the text finalised by January and coming into force once nine countries have ratified it.

The ratification threshold would allow the treaty to go into place even if some euro states − such as Ireland, which may have to hold a referendum − are having problems getting domestic approval, EUObserver reported.

A euro country that rejected the treaty after it had already come into place will not be bound by it.

Non-euro countries, who agree to sign up to the treaty, will be bound by the agreement as soon as they take on the single currency, but can put in place some of the details immediately.

So after all, the much-vaunted new treaty on budgetary discipline is likely to be an extremely narrow text, allowing it to have a smoother passage through national parliaments. Containing just 14 articles, the text obliges those that have ratified it to introduce into their Constitutions a balanced-budget rule. The treaty also says that those countries that are in excessive deficit will have to submit “economic partnership plans” to the commission and council.

Sanctions will also be more automatic for fiscal miscreants while the text says that major economic policy reforms should be coordinated at the euro level.

The new text will thus be only two or three pages long that will not even mention regular eurozone summits – something that Nicolas Sarkozy was very much in favour of.

However, it is said it makes what is seen as an oblique reference to tax harmonisation − a bug bear of countries such as Slovakia − by saying that countries “where appropriate and necessary” will use a fast-track integration process known as “enhanced cooperation”.

Negotiations on the text will start this coming week in the euro working group − which brings together senior treasury officials from across the member states.

The limited treaty would also leave, it is said, much of the heavy changes on more intrusive fiscal rules to the normal EU legislative process, where the UK has equal standing as other member states. Some of these measures, including the so-called ‘six pack’, have already been approved and went into force this month.

This process, focused on EU legislation, has long been urged by European leaders in Brussels who have argued that much of the discipline urged by Germany is achievable through existing treaties and requires no new pacts.

Since last week’s summit, France has continued to push for a deal that would set up parallel bureaucracies within existing EU institutions to coordinate and monitor eurozone fiscal policy. This would bring into existence a two-tier or two-speed Europe.

But this, it would seem, is not at all what Germany wants: Germany has always tried to keep the entire EU family together.

Much has been made in the international media about comments by the Governor of the Central Bank of France.

French officials have sought to prepare the public for the likelihood that Paris will lose its top-notch AAA rating from S&P for the first time since 1975, playing down the potential setback and focusing attention instead on neighbouring Britain. President Nicolas Sarkozy had vowed to keep the top rating, and it could become an issue in next year’s election campaign.

Bank of France Governor Christian Noyer said that if ratings agencies were even-handed, Britain deserved to be downgraded before France.

The credit rating agency Fitch has told euro zone countries it believes a comprehensive solution to their debt crisis is beyond reach, putting six eurozone economies including Italy on watch for potential downgrades in the near future.

It reaffirmed France’s top-notch triple-A rating but even here said the outlook was now negative, meaning it could be downgraded within two years.

It said that, following the EU summit a week ago, it had concluded that “a ‘comprehensive solution’ to the eurozone crisis is technically and politically beyond reach”.

“Of particular concern is the absence of a credible financial backstop,” it said. “In Fitch’s opinion this requires more active and explicit commitment from the ECB to mitigate the risk of self-fulfilling liquidity crises for potentially illiquid but solvent Euro Area Member States.”

It put Belgium, Spain, Slovenia, Italy, Ireland, and Cyprus on negative watch, which could mean a downgrade within three months.

The British haven’t been shy with opinions on their neighbour across the channel. On 14 November, British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne told the Evening Standard that the “markets are now even asking questions about France” and said it had been much slower than Britain to address its budget deficit. Just four days earlier, former Prime Minister Gordon Brown said “France is in danger of being picked off by the markets in the coming weeks and months.”

The Franco-British spat at the EU is far from the first for the countries that have had a prickly relationship for hundreds of years. France twice vetoed Britain’s application to join what was then the Common Market before relenting in 1973.

Margaret Thatcher and Francois Mitterrand clashed throughout the 1980s about the EU’s budget. The bloc’s nascent attempts to create a common foreign policy were shredded by Tony Blair’s and Jacques Chirac’s opposing views on the Iraq War.

The two countries are now pitted against each other on the question of cutting the cost of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, while Britain opposes French and German plans to create a European financial-transaction tax.

Britain points to the bond markets as an endorsement of austerity policies that have stifled growth while isolating the UK from the concerns weighing on the euro area.

“We have a credible plan to cut our debt,” Vickie Sheriff, a spokeswoman for Cameron said in London. “That is reflected in the bond yield. A lot of people are commenting on the eurozone crisis and the issues around it.”

French 10-year bonds yield about three per cent, the highest of the six top-rated euro area countries. The UK borrows for 10 years at about two per cent, a rate that’s kept down by a Bank of England bond-buying programme that’s potentially equal to a quarter of Britain’s outstanding government debt. The European Central Bank has balked at broadening its bond-buying programme.

France’s deficit will be 5.8 per cent of economic output in 2011 compared with Britain’s 9.4 per cent. Its government debt is 85.4 per cent of economic output in France, the most of any top-rated euro nation, compared with 84 per cent across the Channel.

“We are all in the same boat,” said Philippe D’Arvisenet, chief global economist at BNP Paribas SA in Paris.

In the third quarter, the British economy grew 0.5 per cent and the French economy 0.4 per cent, according to Eurostat. France’s Insee statistical institute says France is entering a recession that will last until early next year, with output shrinking 0.2 per cent in the fourth quarter of this year and another 0.1 per cent in the first quarter of 2012.

Britain faces a 0.5 per cent contraction in the fourth quarter and 0.4 per cent growth in the first quarter, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility. The National Institute for Economic and Social Research said on 3 November there’s a 50 per cent chance that Britain slips back into recession.

The unemployment rate for 2011 will be 9.8 per cent in France and 7.9 per cent in Britain, Eurostat said in November. France’s inflation rate was 2.7 per cent in November, compared with 4.8 per cent in Britain.