Huffing and Puffing

Contrary to what one might expect, it seems quite possible that Wee Nicky does feel a certain genuine irritation at Daveybloke's bumbling arrogance in Brussels. Despite Wee Nicky's urgent need to be accepted as a true and paid-up member of the Bullingdon Club, there are one or two cultural obstacles. Daveybloke, for example, has little use for foreigners except as the stuff of stage comedy, rather like women. Wee Nicky admits to foreign blood and speaks several European languages, although it is not entirely clear how many of them he uses to tell the truth.

Hence, after comprehensively selling out on health and education, and being outmanoeuvred, outspent and outfibbed on electoral reform, it appears that Wee Nicky and his Deputy Conservatives have decided to take a stand on Europe; always provided, no doubt, that it isn't the sort of nasty, inconvenient, unpatriotic stand over which somebody might have to resign. Wee Nicky has had his chums out since yesterday morning, saying how shocking and stunning it is for Daveybloke to behave like a right-wing Conservative front-man with a lot of restive knuckles scraping the ground behind him, and how spectacularly awful Daveybloke has been to Wee Nicky after all he's done, and above all how important it is for the nation that despite the sheer hurtfulness of it all Wee Nicky and his chums courageously persist in their endurance of the moral agony that goes with retaining their ministerial chauffeurs.