The British Ambassador to Poland, Unplugged

Once again, via OxBlog (with little comment)

I can't imagine, nor recall, anything like this ever happening in the US. If ever there was a classic example of the maxim "all e-mail is public," then this is it. From the Times of London, two paragraphs from a private note sent by Her Majesty's Ambassador Charles Crawford to two colleagues:

I am being asked to give more UK taxpayers money to an EU which for years can not produce properly audited accounts. Mon ami Jacques with the support of most of you is nagging me to give the EU more money while the refusing to surrender an inch or even a centimetre on the CAP - a programme which uses inefficient transfers of taxpayers money to bloat rich French landowners and so pump up food prices in Europe, thereby creating poverty in Africa, which we then fail to solve through inefficient but expensive aid programmes. The most stupid, immoral state-subsidised policy in human history, give or take Communism.

As for the new member states, we like you so much that we are proposing in the Budget a huge new transfer of funds to you on a scale which will give your people the greatest boost in 1000 years. I will be attacked by my scary new teenage Tory opposition for building roads and hospitals in Poland and Hungary, rather than in poor areas of the UK. We - unlike most other old EU MS sitting here – have opened our labour markets. HMG have created more jobs for Poles in the past year than the Polish Government. Yet not one of you nor a single newspaper in any of your capitals has expressed a single word of gratitude or appreciation for the UK position in all this. So much for solidarity.

There's little doubt every word in his note is true; bureaucracies everywhere are bad, European bureaucracies are diabolical. Not for nothing the term "Machiavellian" originated in Europe.

You really should read the whole thing. The sarcasm is brutal and beautiful.

One wonders what Tony Blair thinks. Or what he'll do. Wouldn't it be damned refreshing if Blair just came right out and said "Brilliant! I share the ambassador's views."? He'd be PM for Life.