With their own tax code, their own dense jargon, the EU's Brussels-crats are intellectually and socially a class apart. The Eurobubble of your Sun editor's imagination really does exist. Everywhere's got its worldview, its anthropology, and our "unelected, unaccountable" elected, fully audited Brussels guv'nors are no different.
The difference is that 90 minutes on the Eurostar translates in the British media into a far-off land of which we know little. In Brexit's ongoing ping-pong of bald assertions, we're now in danger of diluting even that little we thought we knew. So I decided to call up a bunch of these Eurocrat orcs and ask them about how it all goes down there. What follows are their stories, anonymised and jumbled up, but also verbatim.
They're NGO workers, journalists, civil servants, lobbyists, consultants β three Brits, one Irish, one French, one Anglo-French, who all agreed to talk as candidly as they could about the pleasures and pitfalls of Eurobubblin' it. But if you make it to fonctionnaire β a proper job as a civil servant β the money's great. You start at around Euros a month. And rent's about half what it is in London. That's 20 percent more than David Cameron gets. It's certainly more than enough for his 'n' hers Mercedes when you only pay a special Eurocrats' There's a shopping mall actually inside the EU complex with subsidised prices β a 10 percent discount for diplomats.
They call it the golden cage. People really want to leave, but they're addicted to the lifestyle. So even if you've bagged a Euro salary β well, sorry, you'll only be taking home about Loads of people on the perimeter of the circus are just getting by. When you arrive, it can feel like one big summer camp, one long Erasmus.
You've got lots of people from different countries who normally arrive there single, and are often leaving again after a few years or just a few months. They're all from very similar educational backgrounds. It's a boozy culture anyway. It's a great recipe for shagging like rabbits. Tinder has changed the scene, as anywhere. It's not so bar-focused anymore. There are plenty of stories of married MEPs turning up on Tinder. Then there's the inevitability β and it's happened to me β that someone you've shagged will turn up opposite you in a meeting the next week.
