The most depressing number in Britain right now is not the national debt, small boat arrivals, the IQ of Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband, or the price of a train ticket, though all four make one want to emigrate into a compost bin. It is 43.
According to a recent YouGov survey, just 43 per cent of adults in Great Britain have confidence in their nation’s police. This is a tragedy. The British policeman was one of our noblest soft-power inventions. He was unarmed, faintly comic, yet morally reassuring. He had a helmet, a notebook, and he knew the location of the post office. Other countries had bristling polizei, with menacing riot kit. We had Dixon of Dock Green. Now all that is gone, and it means a hoary old European joke needs rewriting.
You surely know the one I mean: ‘Heaven is where the British are the police, the Germans the mechanics, the French are the chefs, the Italians the lovers, and it is all organised by the Swiss. Hell is where the British are the chefs, the French the mechanics, the Germans the police, the Swiss the lovers, and it is all organised by the Italians.’
As you can see, this is somewhat outdated. Allow me to revamp it, country by country. Start with Britain. If we now have the police force from Hell, and we do – ask Henry Nowak, or thousands of white British girls from Telford to Rotherham – what do we Brits do in European Heaven? The obvious answer is: cooking. Yes, cooking. When I travel continental Europe, which I do a lot, I am constantly surprised by food which, quite frankly, we do better at home. With superior spicing.
I’m not saying British food is always and everywhere the best, but these days a good gastropub will often feed you better than a French brasserie, or Italian trattoria, and so on. Meanwhile our supermarkets can be marvels of fine produce, MasterChef has made the average British home cook more skilled and imaginative than his euro-equivalents, and the wild diversity of cuisine on our streets, from curries to laksas to injera, kimchi and tchakpalo, is the only unalloyed good to come out of mass immigration.
Which brings us to our closest neighbours, the French. Because I am going to put their chefs in the kitchens of the new European Hell. Yes, désolé. This is not because they make the worst food in western Europe (take a bow, Holland and Germany) – French food can still astonish. But too often it is over-elaborate, all foams and gels, without the required execution, or it arrives frozen from a commissary in Paris and is microwaved by a bored kid called Théo. Given their still lustrous reputation, French chefs are now the most disappointing in Europe, so into Euro-Hades they go.
On the upside, I’m putting France in charge of organisation in Euro-Paradise. Spend two weeks in France and you can only be impressed by the smooth efficiency of the nation, from the high-speed trains to the immaculate urbanism (underground parking in cities!), to the no-joke brilliance of high-tech launderettes. Everything is so cleverly, logically thought through in France, as befits their Cartesian roots. C’est superbe.
Germany? They were once the mechanics in Elysium, but oh dear oh dear. For so long, the sound of a Mercedes door closing was the satisfying scrunch of civilisation at its technological peak, but now their cars are made better by the Chinese. They also build airports almost as slowly as the British build high-speed rail, and, speaking of rail, have you taken a German train recently?
Everything is so cleverly, logically thought through in France, as befits their Cartesian roots
In the last decade, Deutsche Bahn has become a national joke with poor catering. In 2025, only about 60 per cent of its long-distance trains ran on time, which is the punctuality record of a Cornish branch line during a peasant rebellion. Recently, Germany’s entire rail network was halted for about two hours by a communications-system failure. The Germans, therefore, are no longer the mechanics of Heaven.
But what will Germans do in Euro-Heaven? Make love, of course. Why? Because Boris Becker once had sex in a cupboard, and they have nude business meetings in saunas. In their horny new role, the sexpower-krauts will replace the Italians as the erotic gods of Euro-Heaven, but then, that is only right. Because have you seen Italy’s fertility stats? In 2025, Italy produced 1.14 children per woman, with births down to 355,000. Moreover, the famous Italian lover now seems more ornamental than operational. Probably because so many men live at home with their mums into their forties there is a word for them: mammoni.
So what can contemporary Italians do in Euro-Heaven? Don’t laugh, but I reckon they should be the police. Not because they would necessarily be the best but because they wear such elegant uniforms, and they can be charming even when arresting you. As for Hell, the Italians can remain the organisers, as before, because this is the country that conceived and built Ferrari and Lamborghini, but maintains a road system so cratered NASA allegedly uses it to train astronauts for Mars.
Which brings us to the Swiss. What do they do in Heaven? Mechanics, obviously. They make clocks that run like clockwork, and trains that go through the Alps. Not over or around. Through. Switzerland is an entire nation on the spectrum. Which is exactly what you want in a mechanic. Ask Elon Musk.
And so, there it is. Here’s the new joke. In the new European Heaven, the British are the chefs, the Swiss the mechanics, the Germans the lovers, the Italians the police, and the French organise everything. Are you laughing yet?
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