The year of the unpleasant return is finally over!

10 months ago 23

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Welcome to a special POLITICO 28 edition of Declassified, a weekly humor column.

So, as 2023 staggers to a close like a bloody-nosed drunk lurching down the street on the way to the all-night garage, there’s one main takeaway: Never rule out terrible people and things making a comeback.

Obviously, top of the list is the conflict in the Middle East, which had definitely gone away until October 7 (are you absolutely sure about this?: International affairs editor).

Not far behind was the U.K., whose tumultuous political year was bookended by two very unlikely returns.

First, in February, Liz Truss came back. You may remember that Truss was unceremoniously and embarrassingly ousted as prime minister after just 45 days in October 2022 — that’s less time than Rihanna’s “Umbrella” spent at No. 1 in the U.K. singles chart — because the economy had crashed through the floor. But she roared back in style with a 4,000-word essay in the Sunday Telegraph in which she slammed the “powerful economic establishment” which she said led to the abrupt end of her premiership; a run, you will recall, so short that she was outlasted by a lettuce (the lettuce, incidentally, got a job as a senior economist at the World Bank).

And then at the end of the year, perhaps even more improbably, we saw the return of David Cameron, the former prime minister and shed-dweller who, it is rumored, once fucked … an entire country.

Over in France, we saw the return of sex and sleaze to high-level politics, which for some time had been repressed by the gray-suitedness of the Macron years. But fair play to Macron who, faced with mounting anger from citizens asked to work a massive 14 hours a week, gathered his Cabinet and asked that time-honored question: “Who is prepared to get naked and distract people from the the trash-filled, rat-infested, burning tire-fire that is Paris?”

Marlène Schiappa, the junior social affairs minister, stepped forward and appeared on the cover of Playboy magazine in April. She was, it should be pointed out, not naked in the magazine (great news for those who buy Playboy only for the articles) but wore a low-cut white dress. It did Schiappa’s career no good, as she was booted out of government a few months later.

Not going away, however, are France’s bedbugs, which are threatening to make Paris unbearable. Didn’t Parisians already do that?

In late summer, the French capital was fumigated for the first time ever — does the revolution count as a fumigation of sorts? — to stop the deadly mosquitos spreading dengue fever. Then French intelligence (as in the security services, not as in intellectuals sitting in smoky bars, thinking a lot and gazing into the distance) said the Kremlin had been actively stoking fears about bedbugs in Paris, which at least represents some kind of return to normality as most things are actually Russia’s fault.

Anyway, thank goodness all of the surprising and often unpleasant returns were confined to 2023, and next year will be nice and calm.

What’s that? A U.S. election? Next year? Who’s running?

Oh dear god!