The EU in summertime: Naked and with lost luggage

Welcome to Declassified, a weekly humor column.

Just as the Olympics get going in Paris, Brussels has followed the lead of Joe Biden and dropped out of the race to do any work. The streets of the European Union’s capital are now emptier than the notepad of a far-right MEP after a committee meeting.

But some (very minor) work needs to be done during late July and August. Older readers may remember the summer of 2009 when the European Commission — and in particular Antonio Tajani, then the European commissioner for transport and now Italian deputy prime minister — warned of the dangers of lost luggage. Tajani described the “phenomenon” of lost luggage as “very important” and “extremely worrying.”

This is undoubtedly as big a problem now as it was then. Perhaps it’s an issue for Ursula von der Leyen’s planned European commissioner for the Mediterranean (alongside having to defend EU migration deals with North African states).

A year before Tajani’s plea to keep a closer eye on your suitcase, the EU launched a bloc-wide labeling scheme for suntan lotion. Günter Verheugen, then the commissioner for industry, called the sunscreen-labeling scheme an example of “responsible business behavior.” Verheugen had perhaps more of a need for suntan lotion than the rest of us as in 2006, photographs emerged of him relaxing on a nudist beach in Lithuania wearing nothing but a baseball cap (oh, and he was with his female chief of staff).

Back to Tajani and summer stories and you may recall that in 2019, the Italian, who was then president of the European Parliament (he’s had quite the career, this guy), wrote to his counterpart in the Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, to point out that the Parliament was very much going on holiday, so don’t bother us.

“Dear Jean-Claude,” went Tajani’s letter. “I would be grateful if you could suspend, from the date of reception of this letter, the transmission of any notification or request to the budgetary authority [that’s the Parliament].”

The date of the letter? July 13.

That was shortly after Juncker called the Parliament “ridiculous” when only around 30 MEPs turned up to hear a speech by then-Maltese Prime Minister and court case enthusiast Joseph Muscat.

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Paul Dallison is POLITICO’s deputy EU editor.