Diplomatic language

The Poles were supposed to be our allies in Europe but Cameron appears to have lost them.  The Guardian reports:

The gulf between Britain and its key European allies has been highlighted by the leaking of an expletive-laden transcript of secretly taped conversations in which the Polish foreign minister accuses David Cameron of having "fucked up" his handling of the EU.

As the prime minister braced himself for an embarrassing defeat on Friday in his campaign to block Jean-Claude Juncker from becoming European commission president, Downing Street was forced to defend Cameron's handling of the EU after he was accused of resorting to "stupid propaganda" to appease Eurosceptics. Radoslaw Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, who is close to many senior Tories and who as an Oxford University student was a member of the Bullingdon Club at the same time as Boris Johnson, made the comments in a conversation with the former Polish finance minister Jacek Rostowski.

In a conversation that may have been related to Cameron's plans to curb EU migrants' access to benefits or to his plans to restrict freedom of movement, Sikorski is quoted as saying: "It's either a very badly thought-through move or, not for the first time, a kind of incompetence in European affairs. Remember? He fucked up the fiscal pact. He fucked it up – simple as that. He is not interested. He does not get it. He believes in the stupid propaganda. He stupidly tries to play the system."

On the tape, printed in Monday's edition of the news magazine Wprost, Sikorski is quoted as criticising what he sees as Cameron's attempt to appease British Eurosceptics with soundbites. "You know, his whole strategy of feeding them scraps in order to satisfy them is, just as I predicted, turning against him; he should have said, 'Fuck off,' tried to convince people and isolate [the sceptics]. But he ceded the field to those that are now embarrassing him."

In another secretly taped conversation, the spokesman for the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, claims Tusk "fucked him [Cameron] up good" during a conversation with the British prime minister over plans to curb access to benefits in the UK. The tapes were leaked as Cameron acknowledged that he was on course to lose his battle to prevent Juncker from being nominated by EU leaders as the next European commission president at a summit in Brussels later this week.

If this is what the Poles are saying, imagine the conversation in Madrid, Rome, Paris and Brussels.