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Cambridge saw something approaching excitement last Thursday as the Union prepared to host Jean-Marie Le Pen. The Union President received two death threats. Police thronged the building. Even TCS got wind of the story.
In an act of John Simpson-esque daring, your self-appointed sketch writer borrowed a friend's membership card and infiltrated this seminal piece of theatre. Tensions ran high even before Le Pen entered the chamber. Hundreds of SWP protestors in their Gap T-shirts banged on the windows and played out-of-tune trumpets. A white-haired Proctor stood guard by the fire exit, poised with his zimmer to defend the ancient virtues of free-speech against the great unwashed of Kings.
In true fascist style Le Pen entered thirty minutes late, surrounded by heavies whose lack of foppish fringe did little to alleviate his Party's thuggish image. "Le Pen Président!" shouted a funny little greasy creature (no Meistermensch he) from the left of the chamber. Deafening anti-Nazi chants continued outside.
"Bonjour", said the man who came second in France's 2002 Presidential Elections. All those who had done French GCSE nodded wisely and waited for the beep and the offer to listen again for the second time. "Allow me to present myself", he bumbled on (Beta minus - poor, overly literal translation). The crowd was on tenterhooks by now, ready for more of this gritty Realpolitik. Alas, Jean-Marie was unable to sustain his rabble-rousing opening as the flunkey with his prepared oration still hadn't arrived. Le Pen might be mightier than le sword, but he was pretty weak without les notes.
Instead, we were treated to a question and answer session, opened by journalist Peter Hitchens who pointedly addressed his questions through the medium of the Union President. It must have been an unsettling sensation for a Mail on Sunday columnist to feel positively left-wing. This somewhat third-hand process was not helped by Le Pen's awful Franglais and the "translations" of his suave foreign affairs spokesman, the Comical Ali of Le Front National. Linguists and assured bluffers guffawed regularly at the inconsistencies. Le Pen's comment that immigrants would "balayer" (wipe out) French culture was watered down to "alter". If only Enoch Powell had enjoyed the services of such a verbal gymnast, we would have had little puddles of issues, not "rivers of blood".
Compared to his spokesman, Le Pen was unimposing, obtuse and above-all dull. "No Platform" protestors will be surprised to hear that we were mature enough to listen and make up our own minds. There was no mass conversion to racism. The rather tame debate that followed - "This house would gag the bad" - was something of a foregone conclusion considering we'd all just turned up to listen to "the bad". However, Le Pen was so singularly uninspiring as a speaker that there was a case for gagging him for his poor rhetorical skills as much as for his opinions. "If you can't be good, at least be good at it," many wags have said. Le Pen was neither.