As all you Zelo Street regulars will already know, Theresa May’s dinner in Downing Street with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker last Wednesday turned into another of those car-crash occasions at which she is becoming increasingly adept. That this was not an ideal situation for our Prime Minister and her confidantes has been, by many Euro-realists, taken on board appropriately. But not by everyone.
No, there just had to be a generous application of spin to the news, the pretence that it hadn’t really happened, that it was all the dastardly work of “Bitter Remoaners”, and of course it had to be treated with deep suspicion because the newspaper article bringing the bad news had been written in German. I mean, who won the war?
How ridiculous could the spin get? Ah, but you shouldn’t go there. It could, and did, get seriously ridiculous very quickly, epitomised by the Sun’s non-bullying political editor Tom Newton Dunn, perhaps with one eye on his explanation in tomorrow’s paper. “A fascinating feed. But looked at another way; what if May presumed Juncker would leak the lot so threw out handy election lines for effect?” he bleated. Oh just f*** right off.
The dinner was last Wednesday. If our side had wanted information to get out, they wouldn’t have waited until they were on the back foot. But Newton Dunn was not alone: Rupert Myers of GQ and the Telegraph also wanted it to be known that it hadn’t really happened. “Interesting thread: seems like the EU's PR machine at work, and to be taken with a heap of salt” he opined, seemingly unaware that if a PR department had been at work, it wouldn’t have come out in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
Didn’t anyone in Leave Spin Land want to take a trip, however brief, into the land of reality? Well, the loathsome Toby Young certainly didn’t: “Disappointing how many Remainers are eager to take the EU's side in Brexit negotiations - the more hard line EU is, the more they like it”. Christ on a bike Tobes, this isn’t a “taking of sides”. It’s a warts-and-all account of our Prime Minister being exposed as a deluded car crash.
Could it get any worse? It certainly could, and to make it significantly so came has-been Sun pundit Tony Parsons, whose Dad fought in the war, which means he’s right. “If not for the blood sacrifice of the British, Juncker would be speaking German today. Show some respect, you puffed-up political pygmy” he blustered.
This generated two strands of response: my friend James Doleman pointed out to Parsons that, if we’re talking “blood sacrifice”, Luxembourg, which is Jean-Claude Juncker’s home country, suffered proportionally the European highest loss of population in World War 2.
And Gary Lineker had to point out the bleeding obvious to Parsons about speaking German: “He does speak German”. German and French are official languages of Luxembourg, and so Juncker speaks them both - fluently. As he does English.
Even when confronted by the grim reality of British Government delusion, the diehard Europhobes still can’t get real. Be concerned about our media class. Be very concerned.
3 comments:
Priceless own goals from Parsons, even down to the shortarse little twat calling someone a 'pygmy'. Gary Lineker must be really enjoying this; the open goals these morons present him with must take him back to some of the tap-ins he enjoyed in his last job.
'Blood sacrifice', eh Tony? 'I gobbed for England in the Punk Wars'. Priceless.
Parson's silly remark shows just how trapped by the past Britain and esp. England really is! Just what the heck has WW2 got to do with Theresa May's disastrous dinner date anyway? A cheap shot by someone who would invoke 'Godwin's Law' should anyone else compare any leading Brexiter to the far right!
Furthermore the onus on anyone claiming spin is to point out where the stated position of the British government in the reports of the dinner differ in any way from their publicly stated position.
People are pissed off because it shatters the illusion that there is some kind of clever secret plan behind the scenes.
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