Welcome to Declassified, a weekly humor column.
We all have different ways of coping with people we don’t like, sometimes involving measures as barbaric as slightly terse emails or frowning.
Russia is rather more direct when dealing with its enemies, with falls from tall buildings and airplane-based mishaps among the favorites. This week, Russian media reported that Susana Jamaladinova, a Ukrainian of Crimean Tatar origin known professionally as Jamala, is on the country’s wanted list. The one-time Eurovision winner’s crime? Discrediting Moscow’s army. Boo!
Jamala, a vocal critic of Russia’s occupation of her native Crimean peninsula and of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, won the Eurovision Song Contest in 2016 with the song “1944,” which is about the deportation and ethnic cleansing of around 200,000 Crimean Tatars carried out by Soviet authorities in May 1944 — much as Taylor Swift’s “1989” is about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the military coup in Paraguay (possibly).
Jamala, who is currently on an awareness-raising tour in Australia, reacted to the news in the best way possible by posting an Instagram story of herself outside the Sydney Opera House, with a facepalm emoji.
Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, you can’t put your enemies on a wanted list — but you can call them names. The high court has ruled that two protesters were “reasonable” in calling former Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith “Tory scum” outside the party conference. Top judges ruled that an earlier court was correct in deciding that the two protesters were not guilty of using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behavior with intent.
So it’s open season on calling Tories names, which is childish and certainly beneath a column like this one, which has definitely never referred to Jacob Rees-Mogg as a “haunted pencil.”
In Brussels, language barriers can blunt the shouting of a nasty name at someone. So why not try vomiting on them instead?
I know you’ve all been gripped by European Hydrogen Week, in which diplomats from around the world have been setting out their stalls and vying for lucrative contracts to export the green gas to the EU.
One conference attendee, however, was escorted off stage after violently vomiting fluorescent green dye across the auditorium, declaring she was “sick of greenwashing.” The protest was backed by the group WeSmellGas, which sounds like a fart-based game children play during their breaks at school.
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“Now let’s get down to business … I believe it was Colonel Mustard with the candlestick in the bedroom.”
Can you do better? Email [email protected] or on Twitter/X @pdallisonesque
Last time we gave you this photo:
Thanks for all the entries. Here’s the best from our postbag — there’s no prize except for the gift of laughter, which I think we can all agree is far more valuable than cash or booze.
“You’d have laughter lines this deep if you’d been made foreign secretary and had a record like mine,” by Paul Barrett.
Paul Dallison is POLITICO‘s deputy EU editor.