Gordon Brown arrives with his wife Sarah (right) at Buckingham Palace in London yesterday for Queen Elizabeth to ask him to form a new government. (AFP)

BRUSSELS • Gordon Brown's anointment as British prime minister yesterday means the major European Union powers at last have a complete set of new leaders and the prospect of a new treaty to overhaul its rickety structures.

But in the corridors of Brussels the talk is of a likely clash between Brown and new French President Nicolas Sarkozy over the direction of Europe that could be as bitter as the 2003 bust-up between Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac over the Iraq war.

"They are poles apart on free-market competition versus state intervention, trade protectionism versus globalisation and further enlargement versus drawing final borders for the Union," a senior EU official said.

"This is a clash waiting to happen," he said.

The two leaders, who got to know each other as finance ministers, also differ on the kind of European Union they want. Sarkozy favours stronger political integration while Brown is described by a British official as "a European minimalist".

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has established herself as the EU's pivotal deal-maker in less than two years in office, may be hard pressed to reconcile their divergent agendas. She shares Sarkozy's enthusiasm for relaunching Europe politically and his scepticism about Turkey's candidacy, but on free markets and trade, she is closer to Brown.

A French source said that in a teleconference between Sarkozy, Blair and Brown last week, the incoming British premier doused the easy bonhomie of the other two by gruffly insisting on the detail of Britain's "red lines" for a new EU treaty.

Brown has made little secret of his distaste for Brussels.

His attendance record at meetings of EU finance ministers over the last decade has been poor.

One European commissioner, speaking on condition of anonymity, said: "When he does turn up, it is to lecture us."

Brown's closest aide, Ed Balls, Economic Secretary in the UK Treasury, expounded a "hard-headed, pro-European" approach in a pamphlet last month "based squarely on advancing our national interest and the EU public interest".

While Blair declared himself "passionately pro-European", Brussels officials say Brown has so far been all "hard-headed" and not "pro-European".

The new British leader is much closer to the European Commission's liberal economic philosophy than is Sarkozy, who startled senior commissioners by expounding a protectionist outlook at a dinner on his maiden visit to Brussels last month.

One participant said the new French leader's call for a "community preference" in trade was a throw-back to the 1960s.

Sarkozy's performance at his first European summit last week highlighted his determination to pursue an active industrial policy aimed at building "European champions" without letting EU competition and market regulators get in the way.

He persuaded the German EU presidency to remove the goal of "free and undistorted competition" from the Union's objectives.

Only a last-minute counter-offensive by the European Commission, business organisations and competition lawyers prompted summit leaders to add a protocol restating the legal basis for 50 years of EU competition and internal market policy.

Sarkozy presented the outcome as a victory against US-driven free-market "dogma", declaring "the word protection is no longer taboo".

"We obtained a major reorientation of the objectives of the Union. Competition is no longer an end in itself," he said. British media said Brown was furious and telephoned Blair at the summit to urge him to fight on the competition issue.