Europe seems to have fallen off Britain's election campaign agenda

London Briefing/Chris Johns: Europe has been noticeably absent from the UK election campaign; most of us would say mercifully absent. Mention of the EU constitution and pension reform are guaranteed to interest the British electorate not one jot.

Even Jacques Chirac's efforts to get his constitutional referendum past a truculent electorate have attracted little malicious pleasure.

That the electorate now thinks Europe is boring is all the more remarkable when we recall that the UK Independence Party was so successful in last year's local and European elections. Robert Kilroy Silk, so prominent in those elections, has crashed and burned in a spectacular way since then and now cuts a rather forlorn figure leading another - new, I think - party whose name nobody can quite recall.

Given the extent to which the issue of Europe has torn the Tory party apart on several occasions over the past couple of decades, Michael Howard has to be congratulated on silencing the fractious internal debate. The sight of Tory grandees tearing each other apart over Europe at least used to add much-needed entertainment value to previous campaigns.

Whether or not this has registered with the electorate is a moot point. Perhaps he would be even further behind in the opinion polls if the Tory big guns were still slugging it out over Brussels and the euro.

Tony Blair keeps insisting that he will serve as prime minister for a full term - which he seems to define as four years. Few pundits have bothered to point out that failure to ratify the constitution in next year's scheduled referendum will provide him with the perfect opportunity, should he so choose, to bow out early.

Chirac, when asked, bluntly stated that he would not resign in the event of a French No. Somebody should ask Blair the same question. I can't imagine him giving as straightforward an answer as the French president.

Chirac is marketing the constitution as a bulwark against Anglo-Saxon free market economics. It enshrines, apparently, the French vision of social cohesion, the welfare state, and addiction to high and rising unemployment (I made the last bit up). I really must get around to reading it as I am sure that Blair is going to claim exactly the opposite.

Should the UK actually have a referendum, I suspect we will hear a lot about British values in Europe and how they are enshrined in the constitution.

But the possibility of a French rejection has failed to stir up much excitement. With or without a constitution, Europe seems, all of a sudden, to be of little interest, even to our governing classes.

All of this could change, but it just may be the start of something. One London-based investment bank has even begun to speculate about a sequence of events that could see the euro start to break up. Outlandish stuff certainly, but one wonders what the credit rating on Italian government debt would be right now if the lira still existed. Hedge funds must be going weak at the knees at the thought.

The temptation for Blair must be to pray, quietly, for a French rejection. It will probably take many years before constitution II is put before the electorate, by which time it will be Gordon Brown's problem.

He can't acknowledge any of this of course. But it is distinctly curious that the man who has promised many times to start making the case for Europe - to sell the great ideal to the British public - hardly ever mentions it. There is only so much tedium that the average voter can take.

Brown, never noted for his European enthusiasm, cannot have failed to notice that the euro zone's largest economies are going through their annual "soft patch".

This is contributing to a slower domestic UK economy, at a time when higher interest rates and oil prices are taking a bite out of the consumer. But the UK is in relatively good shape to weather a period of slower growth.

With double-digit unemployment in Germany and France, another economic slowdown now will, for them, be little short of catastrophic.

Brown undoubtedly is sticking to his long-held view that the longer he can keep the UK economy uncontaminated by the euro the better.

Chris Johns is an investment strategist with Collins Stewart. All opinions are personal.