If you can sue Madonna for being late, you can sue the EU for the same

Welcome to Declassified, a weekly humor column.

We live in a world where it’s hard to separate fact from fiction. Donald Trump has been, and will be again, the actual president of the United States; Liz Truss was given responsibility for something more important than putting out the bins; the socialists of Europe have chosen Nicolas Schmit, a man his own family would struggle to pick out of a lineup, as their Spitzenkandidat; the word Spitzenkandidat is used in EU elections (and they wonder why no one votes).

In the same vein, the regular reader (singular) of this column will know that it’s almost four years since Declassified said Madonna would get to join the EU because she pledged a not-insubstantial $1 million during Ursula von der Leyen’s telethon to raise money to tackle the coronavirus (the way the world is headed, we’ll soon be looking back on the dark days of Covid with a degree of fondness). 

The Madonna-joins-EU suggestion was obviously a joke but that didn’t stop some British media thinking it was serious (which says a lot about how people view the EU and a lot about this writer’s joke-telling ability). The story was then reposted on social media by … Madonna.

Now Madonna is back in the news as she’s being sued by two fans in New York City because she started a concert late, claiming that they “had to get up early to go to work” the next morning.

The show was advertised to start at 8:30 p.m. but Madonna did not take the stage until after 10:30 p.m., according to the lawsuit. By the time the two concertgoers left after 1 a.m., they were “confronted with limited public transportation” — they should move to Brussels!

Now, if you can sue Madonna for being late, surely you can also sue politicians for making you wait. Anyone who has ever waited for EU leaders to finish their dinner and come out and say something — anything! — at a European Council summit will know that the waiting can be tortuous.

There’s a lot of waiting in politics, of course. Belgians waited 592 days without a government (not that anyone noticed) and back in 2020, EU leaders spent more than 80 hours discussing the bloc’s budget and coronavirus recovery fund. Even that fell short of another EU summit in Nice in 2000, when leaders started talking in the morning of Thursday, December 7 and finished in the early hours of Monday, December 11. Someone call the lawyers!

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Paul Dallison is POLITICO‘s deputy EU editor.