So the Cypriots cop it for having fallen for the honeyed promises of the EU

I had forgotten about Cyprus. I suppose it was lodged somewhere near the back of my mind as a cheap British Mediterranean satrapy usefully divided into two: a southern bit, where our chavs went on holiday, and a northern bit where our criminals hide out from the filth. I was dimly aware that we had allowed them, some time ago, to go their own merry way and that since had followed a predictable descent into barbarism, yet another Ottoman invasion and some sort of coup effected by the useless Greeks. And that’s it, really. I know too that over the years Cyprus has been owned by almost everybody, from the Romans to the Knights Templar and various dissolute rich Venetians, and that almost all of these administrations were preferable to the one they have now, which is as one of Germany’s string of bitch-slapped client states within the democratic, accountable and uniquely successful European Union.

I think I knew that they were in the EU, the southern bit, and were thus now trading in euros rather than goat dung or whatever, and desperately miserable, impoverished and angry. I suppose it was also in the back of my mind that if the country had any sort of economy, probably based almost entirely on selling lager and condoms to young people from places like Rotherham and Sittingbourne, it would be now be utterly wrecked as a consequence of misbegotten EU membership. But it certainly hadn’t occurred to me that their own government, having been urged to do so by the EU troika and the International Monetary Fund, would attempt to rob its people of their savings. Still less that all this would annoy Russians. Something new every day.

The decision to relieve Cypriots of up to almost 10 per cent of their savings to underwrite a loan designed to keep this hilarious edifice the EU afloat for a few more months and bail out their own banks was, as Vladimir Putin put it, ‘unfair, unprofessional and dangerous’.