Donny style

‘A German joke,’ a former British ambassador once told me, ‘is no laughing matter.’ The Germans take their elections seriously, too. It has been no easy matter, in my day job for CNN, spraying an international audience with initials as I try to explain how the Red–Green coalition of the SPD and Joschka Fischer’s lot are trying to fight off the CDU and its sister party the CSU, who want to govern with the FDP but who, because of the intervention of the PDS plus some SPD rebels in the new Linkspartei, may be forced to govern in a ‘Grand Coalition’ with the aforesaid SPD…. had enough?

Sorting out the form for an 18-runner sprint handicap is simple after that. But watching the Left leader Oscar Lafontaine in action, I did recall one joke he told back in his SPD days when Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, in his all-conquering early days as Prime Minister, was visiting Berlin.