MR DELORS was seeking to be helpful to the Prime Minister yesterday

when he predicted his parliamentary success tonight, and added an

encomium about Mr Major's role in negotiating the Maastricht Treaty.

Unfortunately at the same time as President Delors was making such

soothing remarks in Belfast, his colleague in the European Commission,

Vice-President Martin Bangemann, was making a euphoric speech in Berlin

hailing Maastricht as the harbinger of a fully fledged federal Europe.

The prologue to the treaty which Mr Major had just dismissed as

''Euro-waffle'' when advising doubtful Tories not to take it seriously

may seem a very different thing now that Mr Bangemann has spoken. His

remarks could not have been more unhelpful from Mr Major's point of view

since they directly contradict his arguments. Who is right: a Prime

Minister fighting for his political life and anxious to stress the older

(Gaullist) view of the EC, or a highly placed official enunciating the

aspirations of himself and (almost certainly) the Brussels bureaucracy?

In fact Europe's future will be hammered out by all its peoples over

time. No-one can be sure yet which road they will take. The astonishing

ebb of support for the EC in France (which was exposed by the

referendum) is a reminder that even at the heart of the Common Market's

creator, popular doubt about the future is formidable. Some observers,

and not with any pleasure, suspect that similar notions are gaining

ground fast in Germany too. Just possibly Mr Bangemann was reacting to

these domestic movements, which because of their echoes of the

nationalist past worry all who are engaged in trying to build a new

unity which supersedes these sentiments. At the best, however, Mr

Bangemann's timing was unfortunate and insensitive, and will be seen as

such in Denmark, for example, as much as here. In both countries the

Vice-President may have encouraged the very forces he would wish to

defeat.

Mr Major should stick to his guns. He has little option anyhow. If

Europe is to remain diverse it will have to have room for contradictory

views of its development. It is engaged in creating a constitution (Mr

Bangemann is right about that) but by consent and at the pace of a

convoy rather than a race track or high speed monorail. Mr Major has a

more immediate concern, to survive politically. The arithmetic of

survival is very close, but Tory MPs are bound to calculate that their

collective survival could be involved too. More than Maastricht is at

risk tonight. If defeated, Mr Major seems to have little option but to

resign. Who will succeed him? It is a symbol of the Government's present

inadequacy that no obvious name springs to mind; each of the most

plausible contenders in the House of Commons is as committed to ''the

heart of Europe'' as the Prime Minister himself. It may be that the

remarks of the Vice-President of the Commission will make no difference

at all: most MPs will have made up their minds by now. Yet if Mr

Bangemann has any effect it will be to weaken Mr Major, who may recall

Mr Attlee's admonition to Professor Lasky about the attractions of a ''a

period of silence.'' But it is now too late.