Stick your baguette where the sun don't shine

Does anyone remember the last time a British government minister made a specific and offensive attack on the policies of a political party of another country? It's not as if there haven't been temptations. France's lily-livered aproach to the Afghanistan conflict for example; Germany's certainty that the financial crisis was exclusively prompted by the 'Anglo-Saxons' (actually I thought many Germans were Saxons) that is now coming home to roost with the likelihood of mass job losses from Opel.

But this hasn't stopped the llaughable Pierre Lellouche, the France's Europe Minister attacking Cameron's plans for Britain's relations with Europe. And attacking these in the rudest terms. 'Autism' !?! - oh really.

I am increasingly coming to the view that interesting though the European experiment has been, the older-fashioned Churchillian notion of the Union of English Speaking Peoples, is simply better. We don't need the City of London (frankly the dynamo of the British economy) torn apart by continental European regulators; we don't need our fishermen to be deprived from working their home waters to allow space for foreign trawlermen who ignore their own rules; and we don't need to be insulted by a diplomatic dunce like Lellouche.

Question, would you prefer to ally with Obama - politically as well as militarily - or with that vertically-challenged Sarkozy or that flag-carrier of haute couture Angela Merkle?