The French guy got the top job, but that is not the end of the row at EADS, where two long-standing European belligerents, France and Germany, are squabbling over who finally controls the future of Europe’s biggest armaments company, which happens to be the parent of Airbus.

In their heads, the French and German leaders – Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, and President Sarkozy of France – know that EADS can thrive only if it is run as a business. Still, they want access to the EADS boardroom – and agreement over who runs the business is barely half the battle.

In conformity with post-war European tradition, Germany waved its hand and gave France the comfy chair; there may be other reasons why Louis Gallois is best fitted to be chief executive of EADS while Thomas Enders, formerly co-chief executive, is hived down to run Airbus, but nationality definitely helps. That was the easy bit; the big struggle is how to allow fair dibs to a German Government without an EADS shareholding while France retains 15 per cent of the company.

The talk is of golden shares, special pieces of paper that would give both the French and German governments overarching rights over EADS. It would confer ultimate control of the business on political leaders and give them unlimited access to EADS. Like the spoilt children in Roald Dahl’s classic tale, Angela and Nicolas would arrive at Louis Gallois’ airplane factory in Toulouse, clutching their golden tickets and demanding that the magnificent flying toys do loop-the-loops for their amusement – now.

It’s part of the problem. They cost too much. The aluminium skin of an airliner is a shroud to political reputations, management failures and taxpayer subsidies. So much government support goes into these projects – the A380 superjumbo received more than €3 billion (£2 billion) – that you might wonder why the State doesn’t just take over the business and run it as a public works project for the glorification of European engineering.

But which state would do the dirty deed and bear the cost? Each government wants control, but neither wants the whole bill. There is no question that both will continue to demand political control over this beast. EADS makes weapons and sells them to governments, while Airbus competes with Boeing, which receives massive indirect subsidies from Pentagon military projects. The location of manufacturing, the investment in jobs, research and the prestige associated with aircraft ensures that EADS must be a “European champion” in the language of Mr Sarkozy, a company that cannot be allowed full commercial freedom just as it cannot be allowed to fail.

Someone should begin to call Mr Sarkozy’s bluff. Is EADS to be a European competitor to Boeing or a French company that makes white elephants in Toulouse? If it is the former, there is an obvious solution to the imbroglio at EADS. France should hand over custody of its shareholding in the company and its voting rights to the European Commission in trust. Mr Sarkozy has long insisted that EADS is a European champion. Let it be so.

There would be no need for “golden shares”, because the European Commission would be the golden shareholder. Its only power would be to ensure that EADS remained European and that it complied with European corporate governance norms. Further economic investment by the State in EADS would be in the form of state aid for new aircraft, subject to the usual constraints under the EU-US agreements on launch aid.

Of course, the European Commission – an organisation politically logjammed and fettered by infighting among member states – would be unable to take any initiatives, other than to prohibit a sale to a foreign power. Despite its golden share, the Commission would be almost impotent – and that is why it would work.

Shadow looms over the assembly line

Another suicide of a Peugeot Citroën worker is causing hand-wringing at PSA, the parent company of the French carmaker. An employee at the factory in Mulhouse took his own life on Monday, hanging himself near one of the assembly lines.

This is a huge company with more than 200,000 staff worldwide, but there has been a spate of such cases, six since the beginning of the year. In April, a worker hanged himself in the same factory. The company says that there is no known connection between these incidents. The French press reports that the police found a computer disc in which he wrote of his working conditions.

All of this casts an unfortunate pall over the stock market fortunes of Peugeot, which go from strength to strength. Peugeot enjoyed a sales bounce in Europe in June, contrasting with Renault, which continues to lose market share, but the stock price of both PSA and Renault suggest that the market believes that Carlos Ghosn, Renault’s boss, and Christian Streiff, at PSA, will end the steady erosion by Japan of the French manufacturer’s share of the European car park.

At Mulhouse, psychologists have been consulted and a team has been formed to watch over the mental health of assembly line workers. Who knows what drives people to such acts, but, ultimately, it must be a sense of hopelessness and despair that nothing will get better. Perhaps when managers talk about the drive for efficiency, the need for more productivity in the face of Asian competition, they forget to tell the workforce what to look forward to. If they can think of nothing good, perhaps they, too, are surplus to requirements.

carl.mortished@thetimes.co.uk

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