Special chefs are a meeting of a member of each cabinet (for a certain area), the legal service and the secretariat general. They perform last minute preparations to proposed laws before they go before the College of Commissioners, but they are a "political equivalent of a College of Cardinals" with a great degree of cloak and dagger work.
The most "special" of these is the group for inter-institutional relations (formerly Parliamentary affairs) as it provides the Commission with an early warning on what the European Parliament is thinking - before it rejects the Commission's proposals. The most astute civil servants get sent to these meetings.
The heads of cabinets meet weekly in the "Hebdo" - the most important meeting of European Civil Servants who direct the work of the Commission and the Commissioners.
Read more about this topic: Cabinet (European Commission)
Famous quotes containing the word special:
“We’ve got to figure these things a little bit different than most people. Y’know, there’s something about going out in a plane that beats any other way.... A guy that washes out at the controls of his own ship, well, he goes down doing the thing that he loved the best. It seems to me that that’s a very special way to die.”
—Dalton Trumbo (1905–1976)