By Anthony Sheridan
One of the most memorable clips from the hilarious BBC comedy Fawlty Towers involved Basil [John Cleese] upsetting a group of German diners by constantly making references to the war.
Blissfully unaware of the upset he was causing he warned staff member Polly:
Listen, don’t mention the war! I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it.
‘Don’t mention the war’ has since become a byword for those wishing to avoid discussing embarrassing issues.
But, it seems, RTEs London correspondent Sean Whelan has never heard of it.
Reporting on the scandal surrounding Boris Johnson, he had this to say on RTEs News at One:
He’s the only Prime minister in Europe as far as I’m aware that’s being investigated by the police and that’s just not a good look.
Here you have somebody who is making the rules for the rest of the country and the police force, the people who investigate crime, are now going to be investigating him and his immediate staff and that just looks dreadful, doesn’t it?
Bryan Dobson, immediately realising that Whelan was blissfully unaware of the embarrassing parallels between the UK prime minister under police investigation and our soon to be Taoiseach, Varadkar, also under police investigation, studiously avoided responding to such a dangerous question.
I suspect that somebody from RTE/Fianna Fail/Fine Gael has since had a word in Whelan’s ear to castigate him for being the only journalist to breach the mainstream media bias protecting Varadkar.
Copy to:
RTE News and Current Affairs
Sean Whelan