The miracles of Robert Schuman and hairy Tory MPs

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Anyone who has worked in Brussels for a long time will have thought: “It’s a miracle anything gets done around here” (spoiler alert: nothing gets done around here).

But sometimes divine intervention strikes at the most unlikely of moments. According to Belgian media this week, the Vatican is checking whether a professor walking away pretty much unscathed from a 2021 car crash should lead to the canonization of European Union founding father Robert Schuman.

Political scientist Hendrik Vos was working on a podcast about Schuman, who was named after a roundabout in Brussels’ EU Quarter (are you sure about this? —Eds) when he was involved in a car crash. According to Der Standaard, a “backpack lay against the broken window, containing ‘Pour l’Europe,’ the book with which Robert Schuman laid the foundation for the European Union.”

The  Catholic Church has been discussing Schuman’s path toward possible sainthood for some time and Vos got in touch to tell them about the ‘Miracle of Waasmunster,’ the town of about 10,000 people where the crash took place.

Speaking of miracles, the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party will surely need one to win the next election. Unless, that is, they get rid of their beards!

British media have written that Tory members of parliament are shaving off their beards because they have been told voters don’t like facial hair (yeah, that’s the reason the Tories will lose the election, not Boris Johnson and Liz Truss and …).

An unnamed senior Tory told The Sun: “Apparently beards are a turn-off. I’ve lost count of the number of times people have said voters are less likely to back you if you have a beard.”

He added: “So it has come off. But it is going straight back on after the election” — thereby breaking yet another election promise.

Another formerly bearded Conservative MP, Tim Loughton, told the same newspaper that Margaret Thatcher used to be very pogonophobic (that’s anti-beard to you and me) and banned facial hair from her Cabinet. That’s apparently because she thought beards were too strongly associated with rebellion and the political left. Karl Marx was unavailable for comment.

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Paul Dallison is POLITICO‘s deputy EU editor.