This month, the Belgian prime minister has come from nowhere to become the bookies’ favourite for the first permanent president of the European Union. He’s lost none of his reluctance: on Facebook last week, he quoted Mark Twain: “Reports of my death are exaggerated.” He added: “And also those of my death as prime minister.”

Van Rompuy was born in 1947 into a political family. His younger brother Eric is a CD&V member of the Flemish parliament. Sister Christine (known as Tine) is a European Parliament candidate for the left-wing socialist party PVDA. Son Peter is provincial chairman of the youth wing of the CD&V and speechwriter for defence minister Pieter De Crem.

Van Rompuy, who just turned 62, was educated at the Jesuit Sint-Jan Berchmans College in central Brussels, then studied philosophy and economics at the Catholic University of Leuven. His career in politics seems to have been marked more by the effect he had on his superiors – the éminence grise Robert Houben, who brought Van Rompuy into the research department, and Leo Tindemans, who brought him into his cabinet – than by any impact he had on voters.

Nevertheless, he is credited with doing a good job in reducing Belgium’s horrendous debt burden while budget minister in the 1990s. He also cemented his reputation as an intellectual, later embracing the weblog, on which he publishes his own haiku.

After the Christian Democrats’ defeat in the 1999 election, he spent eight years in opposition before becoming speaker of the chamber in 2007, and prime minister 18 months later. He came into that job as a safe pair of hands, and that quality may be exactly what the Europeans are looking for. One Dutch report last week spoke of him as “Too new in the job to have done any harm”.

Mind you, the idea of a compromise Belgian candidate has been brought out in the past, when both Jean-Luc Dehaene and Guy Verhofstadt were mooted for the job of Commission president. Both were considered good prospects, and both were rejected by a British veto.

www. hermanvanrompuy.be