Well, after all the imaginary money has run out, and now that the cork has come out of the bottle and the spirit poured away, and the bottle has come out in Cork for that matter on account of there being no tapwater, and floods of tears, floods of dark water– floods of sewage indeed– have enveloped the nation through the intervention of the hand of the Devil (not that I really mean ‘the Devil’, you understand, it’s a figure of speech) we have to search hard for something to relieve the gloom.

And it is not sufficient and does little to relieve the misery to deface a vacuum cleaner. And it is not enough to observe– as some might– that Cork can float. It may not be long before sewage engulfs us all, and we are all in that same boat, up the same well-known creek without the proverbial paddle.
But I have thought of something, and I have heard it on the news. The new and first and historic president of the European council is Herman Rumpy. And for what reason, on receipt of this announcement should we be expected to rejoice? (I hear you ask).

Not because of who it is (yer man Rumpy is a Belgian who wears his hair in a sort of horseshoe, perhaps in homage to the croissant)– although one can imagine excellent headlines of the future in case of possible misdemeanours he might commit or crises which might assail him.

The sordid and sometimes grotesque details of his affair with a pork-butcher’s niece revealed to a worried continent under the banner ‘Rumpy-Pumpy’, his unconventional escape from sudden floods in southern Belgium recorded (with picture) as ‘Rumpy Stilts Swim’.

But no. It is not because of who he is, but because of who he is not. Obviously, the list of who he is not is long and includes both my dead uncle and you yourself and space and time do not permit that we print it here, but he is not Silvio Berlusconi, he is not Johnny Halliday, and he is not Tony Blair.
Herman van Rumpoy will be the first president of the European Commission and this means that Tony Blair has drifted yet further away from the possibility of becoming the first new holy Roman emperor.

Now the self-anointed leader of Europe and the future Pope is left only with Sierra Leone to run. Now he will have more time to spend in the meeting and reconciliation of all faiths. Now he will have to satisfy himself with bringing peace to the Middle East, and the position of unelected head, the appointed one, goes to a mere committee man, a bureaucrat.

It is interesting that titular heads of Europe should be unelected appointees decided on over dinner. But then, thinking back isn’t this how things were always done, at the club or in the coffee house? How very comfortable and eighteenth-century. How very civilised.

Interesting that, in these times when we are called upon to mobilise to protect our ‘core values’ the arrangements made to advance those values and to oversee their application do not include among their decision-making processes any democracy.

But it is a very good thing that Emperor Blair the First has failed to find favour among the great monsters of sheer goodness who wallow at the centre of the European vat, because I personally do not wish to witness a new crusade against badness in all its forms led by a smiling rodent with an evangelical complication. A man who knows that God is on his side. That’s all we need, another one of those.

So, amidst the ruin of nations and the shreds of the economy, let us raise at least a ragged cheer. We’ll pick up your dustbins and pump out the sewer but let’s not forget we’ve got debts we can’t clear, and we’ll all raise our glasses to Cardinal Blair.

Above: The legend that is Herman van Rompuy