NOW THAT IT'S OVER

HOLY ROMAN EMPEROR CHARLES V, the first and most magnificent of the great anointed European leaders, and thus in many ways the direct precursor of our very own Herman von Rumpuy, who is also Flemish, knew full well that even though he ruled from the Atlantic Ocean to the frontiers of Russia and from the North Sea to the Adriatic there was an enormous cultural gap between the peoples he crushed under his gout-ridden foot.

“TO GOD I SPEAK SPANISH, to women Italian, to my men French and to my horse German,” he is reported to have said sometime in the 1550s, although I cannot personally imagine why nor to whom he may have made the statement, nor – somewhat more interestingly – in what language he may have been speaking (although one imagines it was neither German nor Spanish).

AMONG OUR POPULAR MODERN LEADERS, many of whom have been elected, like Sarkozy and Berlusconi, or anointed, like Humpty von Rumpuy and Joseph “Man of Iron” Barroso, one wonders whether awareness of these cultural differences is as acute as it appears to have been 450 years ago for the hapless Charles V. We know that Berlusconi speaks Italian to “his” women and that Sarkozy may speak Italian to one of them and presumably French to at least one other woman; common sense suggests that Angela Merkel talks to everyone as if she were an equine quadruped herself; all the Greek leaders speak Greek, naturally; and Humpty von Dumpty talks Double Dutch whenever anyone is prepared to listen to him.

WHICH LEAVES US WITH BARROSO. If anyone is in any doubt about what the good Mr Barroso speaks then one should consider his words yesterday upon hearing the “rumours” in almost all of the British newspapers that the Euro was about to collapse and either disappear into history or be restricted to only the Benelux countries, Germany, France and Finland. "It is not a solution to divide, the solution is to integrate. We have to create a stronger European Union," the EU Commission President said.

AND SO THERE WE HAVE THE ANSWER. As we see what used to be called the “Catholic countries” of Southern Europe transferring their savings to British banks and into pounds Sterling at a rate hitherto unimagined, we can now conclude what language it is that Mr Barroso speaks: Gibberish.