No10 scandal of fake civil servants hits EU institutions

Real or fake?

Yesterday, BBC revealed that Downing Street had admitted it uses false names on letters to MPs and members of the public, faking signatures of non-existent civil servants such as a “Mrs E Adams”.

The BJ reporters decided to check if such practices also took place in the EU institutions and found out that every letter ever sent by a European commission civil servant was related to a real life individual working in the institutions. Complaints were however received from those same civil servants that some of the MEPs signing questions to the Commission or Council could only be fake. As one senior civil servant told the BJ off the record: ‘If you look at some of these questions, they feel like they are written by a four-year old on a bad trip of meth…I mean, c’mon, no grown-up with a serious job representing citizens would dare put on paper some of the stuff that we get from that building. It must be some kind of spambot generating them’.

The BJ was also told that the European Commission, though absolutely opposed at the practices that took place in Downing Street, had been experimenting with holograms to allow Commissioners to be in two places at the same time. It is unclear if the experiments have yet reached the stage of actual live testing, though one civil servant did seem to hint someone should try passing their hand through High Representative Ashton one of these days, ‘just to check’.