Meat is murder (if you accidentally mention it in a speech)

Welcome to Declassified, a weekly humor column.

Remember David Cameron? (Cue mass boos from pro-EU readers.)

Anyway, when I think of Cameron (and there’s been plenty of therapy at POLITICO’s expense to stop that from happening) it’s because of four things: He started the whole Brexit nonsense because he was scared of Nigel Farage; at university, he put his penis — his, er (Boris) Johnson? — into a dead pig’s mouth; after leaving office, he locked himself in a shed; and finally, he used to deliver speeches while needing to pee, in order to concentrate the mind. He called it the “full-bladder technique.”

It seems that Keir Starmer, Cameron’s successor-but-400, should start employing that same technique after he lost concentration and said the following sentence during his big speech at the Labour Party conference: “I call again for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza, the return of the sausages — the hostages — and a recommitment to the two-state solution, a recognized Palestinian state alongside a safe and secure Israel.”

I mean, the safe return of the sausages has been a hitherto unexplored side-effect of the conflict in the Middle East, but isn’t perhaps the main issue. Maybe Starmer, not a man noted for a sense of humor (or indeed personality of any kind), was promised money if he could get the word “sausages” into the speech (you may remember Penny Mordaunt, a now former Tory MP, losing a bet with former Royal Navy colleagues and having to say the work “cock” a lot during a speech in the House of Commons on animal welfare).

Fittingly, Starmer was speaking in Liverpool as one of the city’s most famous sons, John Lennon, had a song called “Meat City.”

Perhaps Starmer had spent the minutes before the speech reading about Jörg Dornau, a member of the far-right Alternative for Germany party in the Saxony state parliament, who has reportedly been using political prisoners to work on his onion plantation in Belarus, and it made him nostalgic for the free hot dogs he probably gets when watching Arsenal for free.

To misquote the famous line (that he almost certainly never said) from Otto von Bismarck: “Laws are like sausages. It is best not to mention them in a speech about the Middle East.”

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“Cleanup in aisle 2.”

Can you do better? Email pdallison@politico.eu or on Twitter/X @pdallisonesque

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Paul Dallison is POLITICO’s deputy EU editor.