Column | soothing whiskey

Wiske Rutte. Sweet cartoon character. With his Nokia without memory. Like attracts like. After three syllables, he had to clean his phone every hour. How? To shake. Shaking hard. Then the commas, periods and state secrets would fall out on their own. Even the homing pigeons went crazy when they saw Mark muddling with his cell phone.

There’s something charming about it, but we’re looking at a cramped fairy tale with a distraught protagonist, who has to last another two and a half months and who then has reached his goal. Then he can go down in the history books as the longest-serving prime minister of our troubled country. That record is still his only political goal and it is very much to his credit. But it looks a bit like the last championship of Ajax. gum work. The VAR and the ref have to turn a blind eye.

Even the most seasoned VVD members now feel sorry for him. Especially when he got really angry on Thursday. Still in the room. The room that just did its job. He suddenly stood there so terribly alone and felt in every distraught fiber of his tired body that he was wrong. Hopelessly wrong. Fortunately, the vote of no confidence did not pass. Because he didn’t deserve that. I’m just sure Mark isn’t evil. But he is strange. And smart he sure is.

Writing on a Nokia. You have to press the a three times to get a c. So work hard. But it also has something moving. Such a prime minister with calluses on his fingertips. And the Nokia seems to me to be a brilliant diversion towards the Russians. Because Putin has meanwhile also heard that one of the leaders of NATO communicates with a mobile with an extension cord and turntable. Vladimir now thinks our army looks like that too. That which consists of seven rusty knights on lame horses without chariots. Putin doesn’t think so, he’s sure of it. He’s not even that far off, by the way.

Ah yes, Nokia gate. A bump that will have a small tail next week and will not remain in a single Dutch memory after that. So it doesn’t have to be deleted anywhere. But it shows the state of our country so beautifully. So this is us. Our chief executive communicates with smoke signals and does not archive anything. And his Ministry of General Affairs thought that was fine all those years. No one rang the bell or whispered to him that it is 2022 and that he has promised us more transparency. And a different management culture. He really promised. Together with Sigrid. The one from that Van Drimmelenlaatje. The tank cars with black paint have indeed disappeared. Today there is a direct pipeline from the ink factory.

Once again, he had to be forced through the courts to open up his affairs. De Volkskrant insisted. He was defended by state attorney Pels Rijcken. That’s that neat office where the chief executive could unnoticed more than eleven million. So that defends our Wiske.

Who takes themselves seriously in this cardboard puppet show? The opposition? Has anyone seen Jesse Klaver’s witty TikTok thing about this case? I don’t think Jesse made the masterpiece himself. I hope for him that his youngest son of three had his account hacked. Two more of these tragic fröbel productions and they can cancel the intended merger between GroenLinks and the PvdA. Simply because both parties died of natural causes.

Oh well, as long as the country laughs with the politicians it deserves. Even about the most distressing things? Exactly about that.

This week, exhausted asylum seekers from Ter Apel had to rush to Roosendaal because there was no place to sleep in Ter Apel. They would be transported by bus. Did it come from Ter Apel? No, it first drove empty from Roosendaal to the north. 277 kilometers to be exact. Luckily they didn’t have to go through the Kethel tunnel. That was because it was closed. Why? Someone had a cold.