The so-called “centre-right” has discredited itself in France since 1995; now the Socialists may have a chance to remind the public of their incompetence. This could be the last outing for the old Paris/Brussels/Strasbourg kleptocracy.
OOPS! It was the political gaffe that suddenly made former US presidential candidate Rick Perry’s inability to recall which government agencies he wanted to abolish look like a minor hiccup.
Last weekend, the Socialist candidate in the French presidential election, François Hollande, addressed a rally of 20,000 born-again sans-culottes and fired up their egalitarian zeal by quoting Shakespeare: “They failed because they did not start with a dream.”
If you feel that line has more the ring of a Barack Obama-style Christmas cracker motto than the style of the immortal Bard, your suspicions would be well founded.
It transpired that this quotation is indeed from Shakespeare – more precisely, from Nicholas Shakespeare, the contemporary English novelist. While it is only fair to record that the author is a first cousin many times removed of the great Bard, further embarrassment was caused Monsieur Hollande by the revelation that the line in question was uttered by the central character in a (Nicholas) Shakespeare novel belonging to the notorious Marxist terrorist group Shining Path, in Peru.