I spent most of this week in Strasbourg, trying to persuade the European Parliament to reject the latest extension of the fisheries agreement between the EU and Morocco. Under the agreement, EU ships have been exploiting the rich fish stocks off the coast of Western Sahara, which was annexed by Morocco in 1975; officially no other country recognises the Western Sahara as part of Morocco, and the Polisario Front, who are the government-in-exile of the region (and recognised as such by most African countries), have never had any benefit from Morocco's use of their territory's resources.

We knew this was a tough fight. We had tried in September to get the European Parliament to refer the Agreement to the European Court of Justice for an advisory opinion on whether it was legal or not. We lost that vote by 221 to 301, with the fisheries lobby insisting that fishing must continue no matter what the legality or environmental cost, and with the French government lobbying very hard for the Moroccans, who are basically a French client state. Also the September vote was the first use of a new and peculiar procedure, which only came about because I happened to know the MEP who had drafted the relevant paragraph of the Lisbon Treaty (an old friend from Cambridge days).

Now we had another chance, using the normal parliamentary procedures. Three committees get to give their views on the Agreement before it comes to plenary for the final vote. To our delight, the first two (but less important) committees, on Development and Budgets, voted by big margins to reject the Agreement. The key vote was the Fisheries Committee, where the rapporteur, a young Swedish-speaking Finn, Carl Haglund, had also recommended rejecting it. But the rest of the Fisheries Committee, in the pockets of the fishing lobby as they are, voted to reverse his recommendation and approve the agreement by 12 to 8.

It's not unknown for the plenary session of Parliament to reverse the recommendation of the relevant committee. (One other case this week was the plenary's approval of the new Irish nominee to the European Court of Auditors, Kevin Cardiff, although the Budget Committee had rejected him.) But the odds are not great. So I bedded in for three days in Strasbourg, with colleagues S from the Western Sahara Resource Watch organisation, and with J (or I should really say  ج) from the Western Sahara itself. Unfortunately the Polisario were in the middle of their biennial congress, so none of the senior leadership could be spared, and while ج is a good speaker, his English is very poor, and his French not terribly confident (he and I communicated in German, and his Spanish is pretty good too).

Strasbourg is a nice city – excellent public transport system – but the European Parliament is a horrible environment, endless corridors, no decent food, and lifts that do not really connect with reality. There's also the problem of shortage of hotel rooms once you find you have to go there at short notice – my first two nights I was far out in Lingolsheim, and then for Tuesday I managed to find an extortionately expensive place with S in the city centre. At one point it looked as if we might have to stay Wednesday night as well, with all the logistical hassle that would have entailed, but luckily the vote was restored to the Wednesday morning agenda.

I got very few meetings with MEPs in Strasbourg – partly that they claim to be very busy in that mad week (and they are); partly that as a mere lobbyist, without a senior Polisario person present, I don't rate high on the list of people they want to meet with. (In fairness, ج, who actually did have standing as a Polisario official, was working the German and Austrian members pretty efficiently on his own.) Instead, S and I concentrated on distributing information – I had managed to get a leaflet translated into most European languages before we left Brussels, and we put that in members' pigeon-holes. On Tuesday morning I produced another multilingual leaflet, and S, ج and I took the radical step of putting that around the doors of MEPs' offices, mostly in the grand tower which encircles the entrance atrium of the Strasbourg building, but with the Liberals and a few other dissidents in a winding corridor the other side of the river. On Wednesday morning I produced a final leaflet, this time in all 21 languages (you can find how to do this if you know where to look) and again we put it in members' pigeonholes, while the friendly assistant of a friendly Catalan MEP emailed it also to each linguistic group in turn.

Procedurally, the formal plenary debate had been on the Monday night, and it was mildly encouraging. By my count 13 MEPs spoke on our side, including a right-wing Romanian and a left-wing Austrian who I had not heard of (a good sign as it meant we were pulling in new names), with 8 on the other side, all known quantities. However, it was not all that well attended. As we continued leafletting over the next two days, MEPs were debating furiously by email among themselves – and mostly in English, much to the annoyance of the two French members (Alain Cadec and Gilles Pargneaux) who were effectively spokesmen for the Moroccans. The Moroccans themselves were much in evidence; they had brought two senior diplomats to Strasbourg and were trying the old trick of meeting with senior MEPs in the hope that their influence would sort out the foot-soldiers, in contrast to our bottom-up approach. One Liberal from Slovenia complained that it was inappropriate to have foreign agents pursuing him in the corridors like that. I was glad we were not too aggressive.

The vote was called on Wednesday morning. I was now fairly sure we would do better than the 80-vote margin that we had lost by in September. The far left and the Greens were all with us, since they actually sympathise with Polisario; we had also got a majority of the far right and Eurosceptics who oppose all EU treaties and were happy to do the same with this one. We were fortunate that both my friend who had pushed the September vote and Carl Haglund, the rapporteur this time, are Liberals, so knew we would get most of that group. But that still left the two biggest groups, the Socialists and the European People's Party, where it seemed probable that the majority opposed us in both cases (a combination of French and Spanish interests, and the fisheries lobby).

Haglund was called to speak by the chair of the session, and (in English, so as to minimise any risk of confusion via translation) explained the slightly odd procedure – due to the vote in the Fisheries Committee, MEPs who wanted to support his original conclusion and reject the Agreement must now vote against his report; MEPs who disagreed with his original conclusion and want to keep the Agreement must vote for the report. He sat down, and from the gallery we could see members fiddling with the electronic voting apparatus. I wondered how close we would get. Losing by 80 again would be just about acceptable, but I hoped we would at least get the margin down to less than 20 or so, as a decent springboard for the next time we had to campaign on this. At least this time the vote was on Wednesday not Thursday, so the Eurosceptics etc would still be around.

And the figures flashed up: Yes, 296: No: 326. We had won, by thirty votes.

I didn't take in much else for a while.

It turned out later on that there were 58 abstentions, quite a high number; we had a clean sweep of the GUE [far left] and Green groups; we got 88% of those voting one way or the other in the European Conservative and Reformist group, 82% of the Liberals, 75% of the non-inscrits (members not in any group), and 65% of the [Eurosceptic] EFD. We lost the vote in the two biggest groups, getting only 42% of the Socialists and 24% of the [Christian Democrat] EPP. This is itself a pretty extraordinary outcome; we managed to pull together the radicals of left and right, plugged in the Liberals (it helps that Haglund is one of their own) and sufficiently split the big two groups to the point where they were not able to exercise their usual dominance. It is very unusual for the majority of both EPP and S&D to be on the losing side.

Among member states, we again got a clean sweep of Sweden and Estonia (as in September) and also Denmark (the one Dane who voted against us in September changed her mind). We got majorities in the UK, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Ireland and Austria. On the other hand, once again we got no support at all from the Maltese, and lost the votes in Spain, Poland, Greece, Romania, Luxembourg, Italy, Latvia, Portugal, France, Lithuania, Hungary, Belgium, Slovakia, Slovenia and Bulgaria. (Cyprus, again, was evenly split. Appropriately enough.) We won two countries which we lost in September (the Czech Republic and Germany) and another two which were evenly split then (Austria and Ireland), but we lost Slovenia to the other side (purely because of differential turnout; nobody actually switched sides).

47 MEPs who voted our way in September voted the other way or did not vote this time (20 switched sides, 12 abstained, 15 were absent). But we gained 152 new votes (57 who had voted against the ECJ referral, 12 who abstained, 75 who were not present and 8 of the new MEPs). The other side lost 110 of those who opposed the ECJ referral (57 switched to us, 32 abstained and 21 were absent) but almost made up the difference by gaining 105 (20 had voted for the ECJ referral, 12 had abstained, 65 were absent and they too got 8 of the new MEPs.) Among the groups our biggest gains were in the ECR and EPP, with more modest gains among the S&D and ALDE groups. We lost ground with the EFD.

Our biggest net gains by country were in Germany, the UK and the Czech Republic; but we slipped back quite significantly in Italy. Taking the size of the country into account, we also gained more than elsewhere in Slovakia, Ireland, Austria, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary and Greece. But we lost ground in Latvia, the Netherlands and Slovenia. Drilling down to national party level, ج's work with the German Christian Democrats clearly paid off as 20 of them came over to our side; also, from the ECR group, big numbers from the Czech ODS and the UK Conservatives (the Tories had split 7-7 in September with many absentees, but this time went for us 20-3). We gained also 4 German SPD who voted against the ECJ referral and another 4 who had abstained. But we lost 6 of the Italian Lega Nord MEPs (in the EFD group) to the other side. We got all the Irish MEPs on our side except Fine Gael (with whom I had had a most unsatisfactory meeting two weeks earlier). Apart from a couple of Scots and their best friends we got most of the British as well.

In parallel, the Parliament passed a resolution urging for any new agreement with Morocco to be economically, ecologically and socially sustainable and fully respecting international law and benefiting the local populations. (Our lefty friends voted against this because it did not go far enough, and the Euroscpetics opposed it out of general opposition, but the usual comfortable consensus was restored.) My bet is that these conditions are too restrictive for the Moroccans to accept, and that there will therefore be no new EU agreement to fish either in Moroccan or in Western Saharan waters. It is also the first time that a plenary session of the European Parliament has voted against a fisheries agreement. Interesting times.