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Shared Opinion

Hugo Rifkind

Wednesday, 30th April 2008

Gordon can barely speak English either, so why don’t we swap him for Sarkozy?

Say what you like about Nicolas Sarkozy, but he’s a feisty little tyke, isn’t he? Apparently, he put himself through an hour-long grilling on French TV last week. We’ve got our issues with the strange angry man in Downing Street, but the French, they loathe Sarkozy. According to the blogs, he bore up pretty well. At one point, he responded to calls for a new dialogue with the Taleban. ‘Open a dialogue?’ he said. ‘With people who amputate the hand of a woman because she had varnish on her nails? Who have stopped millions of little girls from going to school? Who brought down Buddhas with hundreds of years of history? Who stone a so-called adulterous woman? I don’t think we have a lot to say.’

This is strong stuff. You may think he’s dead wrong. You may suspect that, as a Frenchman, he’d probably still be up for selling them guns and then running away if they fired them at him. Never mind that, for the moment. Just consider the demagoguery. It verges on the Churchillian. Couldn’t we use a bit of that over here? Those Frenchies, they don’t know what they’ve got. Eloquence, conviction and a clear sense of purpose. And they hate him for it. Such a waste. We’d have him. His saucy wife, too, if only for the outfits. It’s just a shame he can’t speak English without sounding like a man reading aloud from a parachute instruction manual, while falling out of a plane. It would never work.

Or so I thought. But then, on another blog, I read about Gordon Brown, trying to explain why he scrapped the 10p tax rate. For reasons possibly only understood at the very highest levels of the Labour party, he was doing a half-hour YouTube video interview with the comedian Arabella Weir. ‘If you are on the pension credit,’ he said, ‘the pension credit is money paid to you and so it is like a negative tax, the money paid to you, so it’s a tax credit. So once we’d introduced the tax and the tax credit, the case for having a 10p rate was diminished.’

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Ben

May 6th, 2008 7:53pm

What an excellent article from Hugo, superb about Boris, but with a surprising pro-Ken twist at the end. Masterly. My only quibble would be in the sentence: "I would never suspect Boris of ... secretly hating me for being a Jew." I'm sure that's true of Boris, and it's an admirable sentiment. But is there a hidden implication that Ken is a little anti-Semitic? But that can't be true, can it? Just as I know Boris to be non-racist, I feel in my guts that Ken is also cleared of that charge. Ken's appeasement of illiberal Muslim clerics was wrong-headed, but arose from misguided leftism rather than anti-Semitism. And the famous verbal attack on a Standard journalist likening him to a concentration camp guard was hardly anti-Semitic, rather an attempt to bait the Standard with its pro-Nazi past (admittedly a long time ago).