“Hey, look – I mean – come on – I'm a pretty straight sort of Holy Roman Emperor. Not that I wanted the job, of course. But sometimes you have to bow to public opinion and accept the inevitable. What ruling Europe takes is imagination and I think I've got bags of that. Did I ever tell you how I watched my teenage hero Jackie Milburn, of Newcastle United, from behind the goal at St James's Park – even though Milburn left when I was four years old and there were no seats behind the goals until the 1990s?
“Or about the time, when I was 14, I stowed away at Newcastle Airport on a flight for the Bahamas – even though no long-haul flights left from Newcastle in those days? No? Anyway, Des O'Connor loved it when I told it on his show. Of course, that was small beer; I soon started doing bigger stuff. Like Weapons of Mass Destruction – those wimps on the Joint Intelligence Committee claimed that intelligence on Saddam's WMD programme was 'sporadic and patchy'.
“I ask you! How are you going to whip the British public into Churchillian war fever with that kind of weedy defeatism? So I changed it to 'extensive, detailed and authoritative', with just the right hint that if we didn't get Brit boots onto the sand asap, Cyprus would be vaporised within an hour. That worked: I always say, tell people like it is and they'll fall into line. So I think I'll make a pretty good Emperor of Europe.
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