Following the dishonourable steps of George Galloway MP on Celebrity Big Brother, and Ashley Mote MEP who went one step further by actually being imprisoned in a real jail, mad and tanned ex-celebrity and MEP Robert Kilroy Silk is to appear on the ITV show I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. Of course he’ll still be paid a wage as a member of the European Parliament, but hell, he hasn’t even bothered to half do the job he was elected for as Nosemonkey eloquently explains. Essentially Kilroy is a nasty and lazy individual, and the sooner he’s away from Brussels the better it is for everyone. Oh, and I hope that make him do some truly gruesome things on the TV show. Some nasty bugs to eat perhaps?

In the meantime the EU is getting rid of rules on the shape of fruit which, quite frankly, should read that Member States are letting the Commission do it. But of course that’s a bit harder to explain than just having a rant as the British press are happy to do. Essentially as I’ve previously argued the Commission has been OK with abandoning these rules for some time, but the Member States have been resisting.

Then there’s that old chestnut, the EU budget. The European Court of Auditors has given a better picture of the budget than in previous years but of course that hasn’t stopped people like Iain Dale having a go at the situation, saying Britain should withhold its budgetary contributions. No, Iain, it’s precisely countries like the UK that are causing the problem as it’s the Member States that actually are responsible for making most of the payments. If the UK wanted to do something to stamp out fraud it would allocate more money for staff to snoop on Member States and check the spending. But then turkeys don’t vote for Christmas do they. Mark Mardell sums it up neatly.