What do satire and Dracula have in common? No matter how many times you drive a stake through their hearts, they always seem to come back to life.
The American humourist Tom Lehrer famously declared that satire died on that fateful day in 1973 when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Henry Kissinger. But no one told the members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee this because they’ve made several attempts to kill off satire since, notably when they gave the same prize to Al Gore in 2007 and Barack Obama in 2009.
On Friday, they were at it again and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union.
That’s right, the EU.
Who’s next, I wonder, for this “distinguished” honour? The Guardian? The BBC? Tony Blair?
And why stop with the Peace Prize? It won’t be long now before these Left-wing grey beards start handing out other gongs to their political bedfellows. Polly Toynbee could share the Nobel Prize for Literature with Roy Hattersley, while Gordon Brown could be awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics.
