"DINNER for one," a 1963 British comedy sketch barely known in its country of origin, is Germans" favourite television viewing on New Year's Eve. Year after year they delight at the sight of Miss Sophie celebrating her 90th birthday with only her butler, James, for company. He is commanded to follow "the same procedure as last year," going around the table impersonating each of the now-dead dinner guests, raising toast after toast and becoming ever more drunk. As one awful year for the euro zone made way for another, the German television network ARD digitally retouched the original sketch to create a spoof of European Union summits. Angela Merkel was the bossy dowager. Nicolas Sarkozy was the faithful butler, taking on the roles of departed leaders: George Papandreou of Greece, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of Spain and, although he is still in office, David Cameron of Britain. Italy's Silvio Berlusconi is a tiger-skin carpet on the floor. The joke was clear: summits are empty charades, only Mrs Merkel matters and Mr Sarkozy is her comical servant. The new year will begin rather as the old one ended, with a Merkel-Sarkozy meeting, on January 9th, to prepare the way for yet another EU summit on January 30th. Both sides of the "Merkozy" couple started the year trying to outdo the other in gloom. For the French president, this crisis is the worst since the second world war. For the German chancellor, the road to recovery "remains long and won't be free from setbacks, but at the end of it, Europe will emerge stronger." For Germany itself 2012 will prove "more difficult" than 2011. Even Mr Cameron has seen fit to evoke "debt storms now battering the euro zone." There is a dose of politicking in all this doom-mongering. Mr Sarkozy wants to tell French voters ahead of this spring's presidential election that only he is up to the task of protecting them in hard times. Mrs Merkel wants to make clear that more pain this year (including for Germany) is not a failure of her politics of austerity but a necessary part of Europe's healing. Mr Cameron wants to blame the euro zone for at least some of Britain's woes. None of this is to suggest that the euro crisis is anything other than acute. It may well intensify; indeed, 2012 could see the currency's partial collapse. There are cracks everywhere: Italy has huge amounts of debt to refinance this year; Spain's budget deficit is soaring above its target; France and other AAA-rated countries may be downgraded; Greece is getting worse, not better; European banks remain fragile. The euro zone's much-promised (but inadequate) firewall has not even been created. An incipient recession is making everything much harder. Yet the actions of Europe's leaders fail to match their gloomy warnings. Governments and the EU are busily drafting the text of a minor new treaty agreed at December's summit, where Mr Cameron famously cast his veto. Here is a quick reminder. Under pressure from Germany, EU leaders agreed upon a new "fiscal compact" to toughen budget rules. They would amend the EU's treaties with two goals: to remove some political discretion in the first step towards subjecting national governments to tighter fiscal monitoring and sanctions; and to enshrine balanced-budget rules in national constitutions, with the European Court of Justice (ECJ) given powers to rule on whether they comply with European guidelines. Britain demanded a partial veto on future financial regulation. When this was rejected, it vetoed the treaty itself. This did not block anything, but it complicates the legal process by forcing the 17 euro-zone members (and most of the euro "outs") to draft a text outside the EU treaties. The new pact may help prevent a future crisis, but does little to halt the current one. Yet much energy will be wasted in drafting it. Mrs Merkel wants to harden the text with new sanctions for those who ignore ECJ rulings. And she wants ratification of the fiscal compact to be made a condition for countries receiving future bail-outs. That, she hopes, would concentrate the minds of voters in Ireland, were a referendum to be called. The French, for their part, want to dress up the treaty as the beginning of a core euro zone, and to extend its scope beyond mere budgetary issues. The European Commission wants to prevent the creation of any rival bodies, and wants the treaty brought back into the EU treaties within five years. The British, despite their veto, have joined the compact as "observers" but are laying low for now. Populated as it is by lawyers and diplomats, Brussels loves this kind of wrangling. The idea is to have a draft treaty ready for discussion by leaders at their January 30th summit, with a view to their signing it in March. Will the markets be convinced by this? Many want the European Central Bank to buy as many sovereign bonds as it takes to calm markets. That kind of unlimited funding will not happen, although the ECB is providing more money indirectly, in the form of three-year liquidity for banks that may (or may not) use it to buy bonds. It says much about this debate that giving bucketloads of cheap money to banks is seen as preferable to shoring up governments. Just keep talking In the absence of the ECB's wall of money, governments are putting up a wall of words. Perhaps they hope that by keeping busy, even on a fairly marginal treaty, they will persuade markets that they are acting decisively. This would be more convincing if they were to include a path, even if only a conditional one, for the mutualisation of at least some euro-zone debt. But joint bonds are unthinkable for Mrs Merkel, at least this side of the German election in 2013. As the "Dinner for one" spoof concludes, Merkozy will carry on, "always without Eurobonds." Such self-delusion would be funny, if it were not so scary.