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Welcome to Declassified, a weekly humor column.
This week in the world of grown-ups behaving like children: Senior British Cabinet minister Michael Gove, aged 54, used the word “bonkeroony” when asked on TV if Boris Johnson should resign. And the Sun newspaper went with the front-page headline “I hope I did you proud, mummy” next to a photo of Prince Charles, aged 73, who delivered the queen’s speech because his, er, mummy was ill.
And then Johnson (aged 57) himself joined in, launching the No. 10 Downing Street TikTok account. For older readers, TikTok is a social media site for people who can’t hold a camera still.
Politics is weird. It’s mostly old people who seem to want to behave like children. Parliaments across the globe are filled with people shouting, screaming and occasionally fighting as if they were in a playground rather than a place in which laws are made that affect people’s lives.
And yet, when actual young people turn up to these supposed bastions of democracy, people get angry about it. Case in point: the interpretive dancers who performed at the European Parliament in Strasbourg this week 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!
Laugh all you want — and the majority of people commenting on social media did just that — but in my mind, there are few things that can’t be improved with the addition of dance (interpretive or otherwise), and this was the most fun thing to come out of the European Parliament since that Hungarian MEP shimmied his way down a drainpipe after fleeing a gay orgy. The only way the dancing could have been improved was if Guy Verhofstadt had joined in, twirling his way around the hemicycle in footless black tights.
Nigel Farage took time out of his busy schedule writing erotic fan fiction about Donald Trump to chime in, saying that “there are many reasons why I am pleased to no longer be an MEP. Not having to witness this ‘interpretive dance’ is one of them.” Of course, Farage never turned up when he was an MEP, so there could have been interpretive dance every week and he wouldn’t have known.
Phew, I managed to make it through a whole column without making a “haven’t they suffered enough” reference about Bono singing in a Ukrainian subway station!
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Last week 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.
“Olaf has unfrozen, so Anna and Elsa decide to let it go. The past is in the past,” by Fred Myers.
Paul Dallison is POLITICO‘s slot news editor.
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