I am not familiar with Vaira Vike-Freiberga, two-time President of Latvia who is known to her friends as V.V.F and to everyone else as Iron Lady.
Mrs. Vike-Freiberga was interviewed today in The Times and, well, I was impressed.
I know that she is a right-winger in politics and, I suspect, a difficult person to disagree with over those little domestic duties around the house like tidying your bedroom or leaving socks in the hall but during this profoundly irritating week when the less than admirable crop of EU leaders are fussing, flapping, intriguing and preening about who to push in as the newly created EU President, Vaira Vike Freiberga has rattled their cages by saying the unthinkable. She is telling them to come out into the open, to let their electorate know what’s going on and to elect a president out there in the bright light of day. Wow!
As a Latvian she knows all about totalitarian rulers having had Nazi and Soviet boots march all over her country. It might just be someone like her, with her profound distrust of soviet-style politburo decision-making that could snap our current leaders out of their bad non-democratic behaviour.
If I could vote for my new President (ha ha ha), she would certainly have my vote. It would be an astounding change if Europe could have a figurehead who wanted to cut the crap. So in my imaginary election, we the citizens of Europe will be voting in V.V.F for President and maybe the nicely extrovert, ex-communist, ex-Prime minister of Italy, Massimo D’Alema as High Representative , the foreign affairs job which is also being newly created. That would get things going.
Oh yes, it would also kick the ghastly Tony Blair out of our newspapers for a bit. He is of course everything that is wrong about our current system of power-broking in Europe. He wants the job but won’t say that he does, he is canvassing for it but won’t be seen doing it. Who does he think we are? Mugs? Well, yes, he does actually. Let’s not prove him right.