Stuck inside a conference center with the Nigel Farage blues again

Welcome to Declassified, a weekly humor column.

Hang on, a bunch of far-right leaders were locked into a Brussels conference space with armed police outside, with nothing to sustain them apart from some canapés, and with thousands of Eurocrats in one direction and one of the Belgian capital’s most multicultural neighborhoods in another direction? I feel an idea for a reality TV show coming on!

How about we call it “I’m a right-winger, get me out of here!”?

The National Conservatism Conference — a gathering of Europe’s hard-right elite — sounded about as much fun as an emergency colonoscopy but it was actually a whole lot of fun. Local authorities fell over themselves to not host the event, and (presumably) catering companies across Brussels were given last-minute orders for a lot of finger food that had no spicy ingredients or vegan options (or any other ‘woke’ food such as soya milk or beansprouts).

And when it did start on Tuesday, it was almost immediately shut down before the courts intervened to say that it should go ahead (a timely reminder that judges can be quite useful rather than, say, puppets of the global leftist elite).

But if this is to be an international TV smash, there needs to be added drama. How about having Viktor Orbán, Nigel Farage, Suella Braverman and Eric Zemmour compete against one another to escape from a locked conference center and make it to the airport/Eurostar terminal in the fastest time while also avoiding anyone wearing a lanyard with an EU flag on it? (Bonus points if they can avoid Brussels’ infamous uneven paving stones with dirty water underneath).

The only disappointment from the right-wing conference was their failure to pick Liz Truss as a speaker.

Alas, Truss has been too busy promoting her book “Ten Years to Save The West,” which contains some cracking anecdotes about 10 Downing Street being full of irritating critters who make your skin crawl, which is a horrible thing to say about Boris Johnson and his cabinet (oh, she meant fleas?) and that Queen Elizabeth II’s advised Truss to “pace yourself,” which is an unfortunate choice of words seeing as the queen died a couple of days later.

“Ten Years to Save The West” is available in the fiction section of all good (and some bad) bookstores.

Fun fact*: It takes longer to read Truss’ book than she lasted as prime minister.

*Not an actual fact.

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“OK, you can watch cartoons for 5 minutes if you promise to keep still for the rest of the trial.”

Can you do better? Email pdallison@politico.eu or on Twitter/X @pdallisonesque

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Paul Dallison is POLITICO’s deputy EU editor.