Welcome to Declassified, a weekly humor column. Declassified is going into hibernation/rehab until January.
Something terrible has happened to the European Parliament — it’s accidentally become interesting!
The Qatari corruption scandal has shifted eyes back onto an institution that should always be important but often doesn’t really feel that way — and which, during the pandemic, seemed to disappear completely. The last two fascinating things the Parliament did before this were to invite a troupe of interpretive dancers to mark the end of four days of events as part of the Conference on the Future of Europe. A waste of taxpayers’ money, not asked for and making little sense — and that was just the MEPs watching! And before that it was the time that a Hungarian MEP shimmied his way down a drainpipe after fleeing a gay orgy during lockdown.
The Qatar corruption scandal has also lifted the lid on an assembly that is chronically poor at stopping rampant graft and has as employees some staggeringly awful people, seemingly willing to sell their souls in exchange for a bag stuffed full of cash (incidentally, if any Qataris are reading this, leave the bag behind the cistern of the toilet on the 32nd floor of POLITICO Towers — and €10 and €20 bills only please).
The first thing to do now that we’ve remembered the Parliament exists is to rejig our “Worst Ever MEPs” list to add Eva Kaili alongside Robert Rochefort, who was caught masturbating in a hardware store; Janusz Korwin-Mikke, who once claimed women should earn less money than men “because they are weaker, they are smaller [and] they are less intelligent” during a debate on the wage gap; and Nigel Farage for, well, being Nigel Farage.
Once that’s out of the way, there are some important questions that need answering …
Can you visit the Parlamentarium, the tourist attraction at which you can pretend to be an MEP, and get given a load of oil money?
The Parliament has a group of quaestors, which in Latin means “investigators.” Why aren’t these people on the case?
Now that Kaili has been stripped of her job as a vice president of the Parliament, there are only 13 VPs left. How can any institution possibly be expected to function with just 13 deputies?
And would it really be so terrible if they just dropped the pretense and called it ‘the European Parliament brought to you by the government of Qatar’?
CAPTION COMPETITION
“The new version of A Christmas Carol, starring Macron as Scrooge and Zelenskyy as the Ghost of Christmas Present.”
Can you do better? Email [email protected] or on Twitter @pdallisonesque
Last time we gave you this photo:
Thanks for all the entries. Here’s the best from our postbag — there’s no prize except for the gift of laughter, which I think we can all agree is far more valuable than cash or booze.
“Usual lack of coordination, and the dancers seem to have caught it,” by Christopher Stannard.
Paul Dallison is POLITICO‘s slot news editor.
