The way Greece has conducted itself in this pandemic is an example to us all

Aristophanes was a comic genius long before the Marx Brothers, but he also gave good advice to the Athenians: stop the war! In his play Lysistrata he had the women going on strike — no more nookie — until the men stopped fighting. During the plague that killed the greatest Athenian of them all, Pericles, Aristophanes advised the young to isolate, meditate and masturbate, advice still valid to this day.

Greece, with roughly the same population as Switzerland and faced with a surge of migrants turned loose by the dreaded Turks, has handled the crisis well. The American media is using the virus crisis in order to attack Trump, but the Greek people will not tolerate such craven opportunism and dishonesty. Criticism of the government is almost non-existent, as the suddenly wise populace is united against the unseen menace. God knows poor Greece has had enough thunderbolts aimed at her, starting ten years ago with the eurozone’s incompatible economic demands. I remember well writing an article pleading with the then prime minister, an arrogant Euro ass-licker by the name of Samaras, to return to a devalued drachma and not to sacrifice the savings and welfare of millions in order to have motorcycle escorts when entering Brussels. Like all craven cowards, he chose the motorcycles.

Recently Louis de Bernières wrote something in the Telegraph about my birthplace that touched me. He ran into Lord Owen and the former foreign secretary told him that he had become a Leaver because of what had been done to Greece. (David Owen has a summer house in the Peloponnese.) The country that was reduced to penury by Brussels was the only one that stood beside Britain in 1940 and managed to humiliate Mussolini’s troops and drive them back into Albania. While this was going on, Belgium, Holland and France had obliged the Wehrmacht and folded like a cheap accordion.