"Whatever happened to Leon Trotsky?"

Terry Wogan in the Sunday Telegraph:

"By the time you read this, the Ukraine will be slowly returning to sanity. From the Black Sea coast to the Russian border, they descended in their thousands on their capital city, as if in a great pilgrimage. Those unlucky enough not to have a tent, slept in the parks, in alleyways and doorways. For all of the Ukraine has lived for last night, ever since that sturdy girl in the leather skirt with the whip won Eurovision for them last year. Just as the winners of the two previous years, Estonia and Latvia, Ukraine saw Eurovision as its chance to show the world that it was free at last from oppression and totalitarianism. For those of us for whom democracy is taken for granted, the Eurovision Song Contest may seem like a grandiose musical mediocrity. To the
people of the Ukraine, it was a hymn to freedom."

This may have been written in jest, but there is here an essential truth. The Song Contest is one of the few ways that the Eastern European nations can proclaim their identity as part of Europe. A message for our politicians?