Mr Bean Goes to Europe

Gordon Brown is off to Lisbon, too late for last weekend’s EU-Africa Summit (which he boycotted), and not quite at the right time for signing the EU Reform Treaty and the accompanying photo opportunity. Officials at 10 Downing Street say the latter omission is a result of a ‘diary clash’. You’d think after waiting to become Prime Minister for more than a decade, Mr Bean would would be in more control of his own movements. Britain’s EU partners are shaking their heads in disbelief at what appears to them to be a clumsy attempt to accept the Treaty (which is correctly said by the British government to be a good thing), but not to risk the ire of Britain’s Europhobic media over GB having his photo taken with a bunch of foreigners ’signing away our sovereignty’. So he’ll turn up fleetingly in Lisbon, making what in Euro-speak is called an ‘acte de presence’, and then tootle off in his battered Mini and curl up alone with his teddy bear. You have to laugh, because otherwise it wants to make you cry.