Call the police … something interesting has happened at the EU Parliament! – POLITICO

Welcome to Declassified, a weekly humor column. Declassified goes into hibernation/rehab till January.

Something horrible has happened to the European Parliament — it’s by accident grow to be interesting!

The Qatari corruption scandal has shifted eyes again onto an establishment that ought to all the time be vital however usually doesn’t actually really feel that method — and which, throughout the pandemic, appeared to vanish fully. The final two fascinating issues the Parliament did earlier than this had been to ask a troupe of interpretive dancers to mark the finish of 4 days of occasions as a part of the Conference on the Future of Europe. A waste of taxpayers’ cash, not requested for and making little sense — and that was simply the MEPs watching! And earlier than that it was the time {that a} Hungarian MEP shimmied his method down a drainpipe after fleeing a homosexual orgy throughout lockdown.

The Qatar corruption scandal has additionally lifted the lid on an meeting that’s chronically poor at stopping rampant graft and has as workers some staggeringly terrible folks, seemingly prepared to promote their souls in trade for a bag stuffed full of money (by the way, if any Qataris are studying this, depart the bag behind the cistern of the rest room on the thirty second ground of POLITICO Towers — and €10 and €20 payments solely please).

The very first thing to do now that we’ve remembered the Parliament exists is to rejig our “Worst Ever MEPs” listing so as to add Eva Kaili alongside Robert Rochefort, who was caught masturbating in a ironmongery store; Janusz Korwin-Mikke, who as soon as claimed girls ought to earn much less cash than males “as a result of they’re weaker, they’re smaller [and] they’re much less clever” throughout a debate on the wage hole; and Nigel Farage for, properly, being Nigel Farage.

Once that’s out of the method, there are some vital questions that want answering …

Can you go to the Parlamentarium, the vacationer attraction at which you’ll be able to faux to be an MEP, and get given a load of oil cash?

The Parliament has a bunch of quaestors, which in Latin means “investigators.” Why aren’t these folks on the case?

Now that Kaili has been stripped of her job as a vice chairman of the Parliament, there are solely 13 VPs left. How can any establishment probably be anticipated to operate with simply 13 deputies?

And would it not actually be so horrible if they simply dropped the pretense and known as it ‘the European Parliament delivered to you by the authorities of Qatar’?

CAPTION COMPETITION

“The new model of A Christmas Carol, starring Macron as Scrooge and Zelenskyy as the Ghost of Christmas Present.”

Can you do higher? Email [email protected] or on Twitter @pdallisonesque

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Thanks for all the entries. Here’s the greatest from our postbag — there’s no prize aside from the present of laughter, which I believe we are able to all agree is way extra beneficial than money or booze.

“Usual lack of coordination, and the dancers appear to have caught it,” by Christopher Stannard.

Paul Dallison is POLITICO‘s slot information editor.