Wonga Wonga Land Begins at Calais

Conservative MEPs - those nice people who teamed up with the Polish chancer Michal Kaminski and the Latvian Waffen-SS Memorial Club in preference to the mainstream centre-right - are worried that some of their colleagues on the mainland may be taking the collaboration business a bit too far. Timothy Kirkhope, a former apparatchik during the Major interregnum, has warned that certain europhobes are negotiating with opponents of Europe's headmistress just when Britain's Head Boy wants to wriggle himself into her good books. "Those two working together can probably achieve more in creating a Europe that is sustainable for the future than any other leading figures in politics at the moment," babbled Kirkhope, who evidently assumes that a prime minister who can control neither his squabbling ministers nor his brainless back-benchers must, by the law of averages, be able to manage something or other. In any event, Kirkhope misses the point. The europhobes in the Conservative Party do not want a sustainable Europe; they want splendid isolation in an offshore Third World tax haven, while Britain's Head Boy probably does not care very much one way or the other. One can hardly expect a salesman to show enthusiasm before the nature of the product has been decided.