Why aren’t cretins like Ken Clarke and Nick Clegg apologising for having urged us to join the euro?

That truly abysmal man, Ken Clarke, has seen fit to lecture the Greeks on facing reality – even though it’s none of his business and has nothing to do with his job:

The Greek voters have really got to face up to reality... they can’t just vote to say could people please just keep giving us some money so we don’t have to change anything.

What about you facing up to reality, Clarke, you appalling tosser?

As if that weren’t arrogant enough, he czlls UK politicians calling for a referendum “irresponsible”. Has it really never occurred to this fool that the truly irresponsible politicians were the ones who got Britain to sign up to the EU in the first place, and those who, like him, have been trying their damnedest to get us to forsake the pound in favour of the euro? He also urges us not to opt for “Splendid Isolation alongside Iceland and others”. Yes - thank God we're not an economic basket-case like Norway or Switzerland!

Here’s what the ciggie salesman said back in 2002: 

The reality of the euro has exposed the absurdity of many anti-European scares... as people can see the success of the new currency on the mainland and the alarming fall in inward investment into Britain as international companies show an increasing reluctance to locate here.

Yeah, those “anti-European scares” – how ridiculous they seem in retrospect. I bet those Eurosceptics are feeling pretty damned silly now!

And this blithering nincompoop – who did so much to tear the Tories apart over Europe, aided by fellow fanatics like Michael Heseltine and Geoffrey Howe – is a member of the present cabinet. Why is that even possible?

A few weeks ago, “Lord” Mandelson was live on the news, looking very pleased with himself, standing in front of an agreeable Oxford college (in order to lend his deluded ravings an air of gravitas and wisdom, one presumes). He was urging us to keep an open mind about the possibility of joining the Euro in a few years’ time, when the present minor difficulties will have been sorted out (and when, presumably, Greece, Italy, Spain, Ireland and Portugal will all be on an economic par with North Korea). Surely you’d have to be off your tits on crack to be thinking along these lines.

One hates to think what substances Mandy was on when he made this statement back in 2003:

Staying out of the euro will mean progressive economic isolation for Britain. It will mean fewer foreign businesses investing here, fewer good jobs being created and less trade being done with our European partners. At the moment, more than half Britain's trade is with Europe's giant single market. But while we are using a different currency from the rest of Europe we are trading in this market with one arm tied behind our back. 

At least Lord Rumba of Rio isn’t still in government. But Nick Clegg’s our Deputy Prime Minister (lucky us!). Here’s what he had to say back in 2002:

The single currency, far from being an agent of continental style corporatism, is probably the greatest export vehicle of Anglo-Saxon economics. The euro has done more to enforce budgetary discipline, to promote privatisation and force through labour and product market liberalisation in the rest of Europe than any number of exhortations from the IMF, the OECD, or the editors of The Economist. 

How’s all that budgetary discipline working out for you, Nick?

You can find plenty more quotes along these lines from the guilty wretches who got it so spectacularly wrong here.

Why do politicians never feel the need to apologise for having supported policies which turn out to be disastrous or which we now know would have been ruinous if they’d ever been implemented – for instance, the EU, the euro, mass immigration and multiculturalism, with climate change coming up fast on the inside rail. In each case these ineducable idiots received any number of warnings based on mountains of evidence which would at the very least have tempered the enthusiasm of any averagely sensible human being.  But no – they ploughed on regardless, dismissing their critics as unadventurous, narrow-minded xenophobes.

Chelsea manager Roberto Di Matteo just turned his club’s potentially disastrous season into an unalloyed triumph – and he still hasn’t been guaranteed his job. Ken Clarke and Nick Clegg have been wrong on some of the biggest issues affecting this country in my lifetime – spectacularly, horribly wrong – yet they’ve still got their jobs. 

I can understand why, for instance, journalists often don’t suffer the consequences of their stupid opinions – the wrong-headed piffle most of them produce has no effect whatsoever on the real world. But politicians, like many of our bankers, make decisions and support policies which create untold misery by destroying people’s livelihoods and their savings, and yet evidently never feel the least inclination to say they're sorry, or to resign, or to doubt their fitness for high office (Ed Balls? Gordon Brown?). Even worse, they seem incapable of learning from their mistakes.