Westminster is choc-a-bloc with MPs trying to outdo one another in nauseating displays of virtue signalling. But for truly hilarious examples of performative outrage, it is useful to also cast one’s gaze towards good old Brussels.
At a recent meeting of the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, Sinn Féin MEP Lynn Boylan was forced into an excruciating climbdown after her grandstanding did not quite go to plan.
Boylan, naturally draped in a keffiyeh-patterned lanyard, complained to her international colleagues: ‘It’s unfortunate that we can’t use our own language in this committee, but I will continue now in English.’ Before she could continue, the chair politely informed her that, er, ‘you can, you can’.
Having plainly failed to anticipate this response, a slightly stunned Boylan told the committee:
I’ll continue in English, because I wasn’t prepared.
So much for defending linguistic rights – Boylan’s grandstanding had clearly been well and truly lost in translation.
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