Dan Hannan: dazed and confused

We promised on Saturday to bring you Dan Hannan's thoughts on Iceland's left landslide.

Here they are.

He thinks they will come as a surprise to us, he's said exactly what I predicted on Saturday: that he will now be forging new alliances with the Eurosceptic Left-Greens. Indeed, this blog noted the EU Observer report that a majority of voters were opposed to membership, and predicted that the real argument over the EU would not begin.

It must be a crushing blow when the one country which was pursuing Hannanism so vigorously swings so far left, so we must forgive him for being dazed and confused.

Strangely, Hannan seems particularly keen to tell his readers that he can never quite tell apart Sunder Katwala (who has been GenSec of the Fabians for five years, and blogs here at Next Left) from Sunny Hundal (who runs Liberal Conspiracy).

He thinks we are interchangeable, and compares us to Ant and Dec.

He knows he was on TV with me, but now pretends it was Sunny. (Slightly strange: Dan and I spent over an hour together as we were doing Question Time Extra ahead of the London elections: I found him good company, and indeed learnt a good deal from his analysis of who can really be trusted on Euroscepticism in the Tory party).

Is this funny?

As far as I can tell, the humour depends on a 'don't these chaps have funny names' piece of side-splitting hilarity, or may be a nostalgic attempt to revive the sadly neglected 'why is it so hard to tell Asian people apart' humour that many people thought was getting a bit stale back in the early '80s when I was at school.

Grow up Dan. Its 2009. No doubt, Hannan will stress that his motives are benign, but its at the puerile end of schoolboy humour at best.

Though I realise its just a distraction technique to move us on from the great Hannan's advocacy of the Icelandic economic miracle. (On the radio recently, again with me, he was keen to stress how irrelevant Iceland's collapse was to his critique of Gordon Brown).

I've been warm about David Cameron's efforts to get his party into the modern world, so that that is one of the ways that we do manage to tell Dan and Dave apart over here on Next Left.

Though if Hannan gets his own way on policy, that will get more difficult.

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