Look at the blister in the photo below and try to think up a more perfect description of him than Michael Deacon's

The weird-looking brute above is Jose Manuel Barroso, soon to be the former President of the European Commission. He's the puffed-up little pimple who's essentially been telling the British people that resisting the European Super-state is futile. Any attempt by the British government to renegotiate the right of any unskilled, welfare-vampire European who fancies settling here in Blighty to do so will meet with failure. Ha ha, Tommy - for you ze war is over! In today's online sketch for The Telegraph (here), Michael Deacon describes the Portuguese pustule as follows:

In case you can’t quite place him, picture Jabba the Hutt after a fortnight on the 5:2 diet.

Discussing Barroso's almost impenetrable English, Deacon has this to say:

Actually, I’ll tell you what his voice sounds like. It sounds like the cassette of an old heavy metal album being played backwards in the hope of uncovering a hidden satanic message. Zzzzurp. Nnnnnyerp. Ziiiiiiiiip. Nnnnyip. I wonder what would happen if you played Mr Barroso’s speech backwards. Perhaps you’d hear the greatest hits of Judas Priest.

I wrote a post about Deacon's comic genius just over two years' ago (here), since when his inventiveness has, if anything, increased, despite the fact that (in addition to his daily parliamentary sketches) he's added weekly television review duties, regular diary columns and frequent tweets to his bulging portfolio. Despite the prodigiousness of his output, the quality of his writing actually seems to be improving: a dud column is now a rarity. He is currently - without a shadow of doubt - the funniest journalist in Britain.  Without him, cartoonist Matt, Charles Moore, Janet Daley and (occasionally) Alison Pearson, there would be absolutely no reason to read The Telegraph, which is giving off a distinct odour of desperation these days (and whose online version is evidently suffering from some sort of technical problem, given that only one new blogpost has appeared since last Friday). Given how vital Deacon is to the paper's success, and as he gives every appearance of being the finest satirist of his generation, I would suggest that whatever they're paying him isn't nearly enough.

Whenever some silly Radio 4 pseudo-comic takes a break from peddling their tired old 1980s brand of "alternative" anti-Thatcher agit-prop on The News Quiz or some other equally laugh-free zone next dares to suggest that satire is a left-wing genre, they should be made to read Michael Deacon's collected parliamentary sketches (and those of the Mail's Quentin Letts) before being ordered to make an on-air apology for having dared to express such a profoundly ridiculous opinion.