Bagehot's notebook

THE DAILY Mail carries a cartoon of Angela Merkel this morning sporting a Hitler moustache, jackboots, riding breeches and doing the Nazi salute. It is all a terrific joke, apparently, a parody of the Mel Brooks comedy "Springtime for Hitler" (adapted by the Mail to add such chortling touches as a "Greek President Stavros" character, David Cameron as Neville Chamberlain and Nick Clegg as a Hitler youth). This follows columns by the Mail's chief political thinker, Simon Heffer, accusing Germany of trying to found a "Fourth Reich.

CONSTRUCTIVE criticism, from a Britain at the heart of EU decision-making. That was the new tone on Europe from David Cameron this evening, as he climbed into white tie and tails and gave his annual Lord Mayor's banquet speech on foreign policy.

To believe the rather lazy instant headlines, the prime minister took the same Eurosceptic line at the Mansion House tonight as he did in the House of Commons last month, when he tried to head off a European rebellion by describing the euro crisis as a great opportunity to advance Britain's national interests.

MY PRINT column this week looks at a huge shake-up of Britain's parliamentary map that is currently underway, and the degree to which this boundary review is causing what one senior Tory describes as "stress and angst" among MPs at Westminster. The accusation from the Labour Party is that horrid partisan motives lie behind the boundary review, which will take the House of Commons from 650 to 600 members and redraw hundreds of seats so that they contain almost identical numbers of electors (a big change from the status quo, in which lots of Welsh or Scottish seats contain as few as 50,000 voters, while several English seats contain 75,000 or more).

THE DARK, thunderous skies over Westminster tonight seem all too appropriate. The storm in the euro zone is reaching new heights, and here in Britain the political and economic effects are making themselves felt.

A FEW years ago, a fascinating exhibition was mounted of old British newspaper cartoons relating to the country's ties with Europe. The show was known as Eurobollocks and had lots of cartoons from the era of Margaret Thatcher's titanic budget struggles, or John Major's fights over bans on British beef. But as someone born in 1971, I was most interested in the cartoons from the 1950s and 1960s, and the time of Britain's first, unsuccessful bids to join what was then the European Economic Community.

IN MY print column this week I examine the odd way that Britain is embracing direct democracy, without ever having formally rejected the representative version. Here it is:

MORE than two centuries ago, the liberal philosopher Edmund Burke delivered a bracing warning to voters in Bristol, who had just elected him to Parliament. If his constituents had opinions, he announced, he would “rejoice” to hear them. But he would not be Bristol's envoy to Parliament, nor take instructions from his electors. At Westminster, he would deliberate in the national interest, not theirs.

ON OCTOBER 24th, it now seems clear that David Cameron will face one of the trickiest votes of his—to date remarkably lucky—career as Conservative Party leader. As mentioned in a previous blog posting on Tuesday, the House of Commons is to hear a backbench motion calling for MPs to endorse the holding of a three-way referendum on Britain and the EU. If carried, the non-binding motion would call on the government to hold a referendum asking voters to leave, stay or seek a loose trading relationship with Europe.