A number of prominent figures have come out in support of the controversial remarks of Aggravations Minister John Haulm, misquoted last week in The Sunday Paper, about French hats.Prime Minister John Brown called the beret, which is designed to cover the hair and upper head of a Frenchman, “a mark of separation.”
Gordon Campbell, Leader of the Opposition, agreed with the embellished diatribe, adding that, in his opinion, it would be “better for Britain” if Frenchmen switched to proper headgear like bowlers and trilbies.
Judge Justice Alison Burkheart wrote in The Deadly Telepath that it was “all very well for Frenchmen to say that they feel comfortable in soft felt, or that it keeps the sun off, but these pate-puddings do not make me feel comfortable. Not comfortable at all. In a way, it could be said that, by wearing such comfy hats, they are being selfish – and that’s a kind of anti-Semitism.”
Meanwhile Conservative MP Elmer Griffins called for the Gallic garb to be abolished completely: “The cranium-cosies are provoking me to intolerance!” he told The Sunmail Times. “How do they think I feel having to hold such unconscionable notions?”
Labour MP Harriet Harlequins said that the beret was “frightening and intimidating” because it was “so obviously French,” while Shadow Employment Secretary Jasper Basculant Devises-Dives suggested that the hat was responsible for a raft of lewd remarks he himself had made to French infants on a drunken spree that morning, calling it “a kind of voluntary apartheid: effectively hate-dressing.”
Reflecting in The Mirror, Jeremy Crace, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, declared that the minister was “basically on the ball with this one, so long as he didn’t really mean it.” The British National Party praised Haulm’s misrepresented outburst, presenting his office with a set of insensitive etchings, so that his distorted views could be commemorated for all time in copperplate. And morose writer, Widesly Amiss detailed a series of bad dreams he’d had since childhood, many of them involving berets and/or snakes, after which he confessed that he wanted to hurt someone now and “I am not overly discriminating whom.”
It is not known what Frenchmen thought, as they were not asked.
Haulm himself was not available for comment either, although eyewitnesses describe a man they thought did look a bit like him, through the windows of the ministry building, trying to become available over the course of the afternoon.
“We saw him locked in this titanic struggle, and around teatime he did begin to have an available air about him, but in the end it just wasn’t enough.”
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