Any day now, a battle bus is due in a town centre near you; it will bear neither John major nor Tony Blair. It will have been sent by the EU Fisheries Commissioner, Emma Bonino, as the flag ship of a million-pound Euro crusade to teach schoolchildren to eat sardines.

Bonino, long rather a hate figure on this side of the Channel, feel it is time to win us over with her master plan t preserve dwindling cod and haddock stocks: wean us off whitefish an on to less noble species , in particular the sardines.

To this end, a jumbo truck , painted in EU colours and decked with the campaign logo, will be trundling round Europe throughout the summer. (This logo, I learn, has been the source of some dispute after designers removed the 12 European stars from it for aesthetic reasons. Bonino replied that, if the stars were not replaced, the whole campaign was off.) The Commission hopes that at lest one million people will see the truck and sample sardines served by Euro-hostesses, while print advertisement, targeted at the young, will praise the sardine in France, Germany and Britain.