THE MORE I see Prezniktwo in action the more he reminds me of an insecure schoolkid constantly seeking the approval and praise of the grown-ups by boasting about his perfect behaviour in school, his smartness and his popularity with the teachers.

And like a schoolkid, he is competitive, wanting to show he is better than his peers. This childish competitiveness surfaced in media reports about Monday night’s dinner in Geneva hosted by the UNSG Antonio Guterres. The guests were the heads of delegations, each allowed to bring one member of his delegation with him.   

The media reports said that the Cyprob was not discussed during the dinner, with the conversation focusing on world affairs and the situation in the region. And according to the reports in the Greek Cypriot media, Ersin Tatar just sat there and said nothing, in stark contrast to our world statesman, who fully engaged in the conversation with the grown-ups.

There could only have been one source of this information, that showed how brainier the Greek Cypriot schoolkid is than his dull, Turkish Cypriot classmate.

OFFICIAL hagiographer of the prez and Phil journo, Andreas Bimbishis has been heaping praise on the boy like a very proud parent, believing his kid is better than all others.

On Thursday he informed us that after the triumph of Geneva, the prez attended the Brussels conference of the European People’s Party (EPP) which congratulated him for “his committed efforts that led to positive development for the first time since 2017.”

According to Bimbishis’ information, “the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, in front of all members of the EPP (including Disy leader Annita Demetriou) congratulated President Christodoulides for the work done in Geneva and the results of the informal conference.”

Reference to Annita was to show she was being overshadowed by the boy wonder in her own surroundings. And in the same issue of Phil, the proud parent had another article to show that Tatar was lying to keep up with the smartest kid.

Although Tatar objected to the appointment of a personal envoy during the Geneva conference, on his return to Kyproulla he “tried to convince people that he achieved his objectives.”

THE PROUD parent had another article praising the kid, in Saturday’s Phil, titled, “Geneva-Kypriako: how Christodoulides locked the involvement of the EU with Guterres.”

Even when the kid does not get what he wants, he finds something else deserving of praise. Having failed to secure the active participation of a top EU official at the Geneva conference as he had been saying, for days, he would do, he came up with another idea.

He got von der Leyen and European Council president Antonio Costa to write a letter to Guterres supporting his Cyprob position. This was presented as a big achievement by the proud parent, even though the practical value of the letter was a big zero.

PREZNIKONE’S eagerly-awaited magnum opus, The Sycophant, with which he hopes to salvage some of shreds of his reputation, was out last week. He has been appearing on television shows and podcasts to promote it, but it seemed a pointless exercise as the entire book is available free of charge in digital form.

I received a free copy on my phone, without asking for one, and I assumed that Nik wanted the book as widely distributed as possible so that a maximum number of people would learn his version of events. I have not bothered to read it as I already know that Nik I was the most honest and incorruptible prez we ever had.

In the end the free digital version of the book was a cock-up rather than a marketing strategy. Nik had sent the digital book to a couple of hacks who sent it on by WhatsApp to a few hundred people who then did the same and now tens of thousands probably have it on their phones

THE RULING of an idiot judge who decided that a wage constituted a ‘property right’ and as such was protected by the constitution has set a legal precedent which now means that it is a violation of the constitution to change someone’s wage.

We were reminded of this colossally stupid precedent by a supreme court ruling in January, which upheld the decision of the district court which found that the cutting of the allowances from the wages of 22 academics during the 2013 crisis by the University of Cyprus was unconstitutional and the 22 had to be re-imbursed.

The funny thing was that it was the allowance that was cut from the wage, and no idiot judge had ever ruled that an allowance is a ‘property right,’ but the university now has to find a big amount of money to re-imburse the overpaid, underworked, entitled academics. 

DISAPPOINTED to see that cancel culture has finally arrived at the regional pillar of stability and security. Who knows, one day we may become a regional hub of cancel culture, although at present displays of wokeness are sporadic.

Thankfully, we are far too socially conservative (if not backward), to embrace the wokeness that has spread like a virus across many countries of the West, threatening democracy and free speech. On our island, unlike the rest of Europe, social justice warriors are few, but they made their presence felt a couple of weeks ago.

They campaigned on social media to stop the staging of a play by Belgian artist, Jan Fabre, because he was a sex offender. It led to the rescheduling and a change of venue of last Sunday’s planned performance, which opened the Cyprus International Theatre Festival (CITF). The play, titled Io Sono un Errore / I Am a Mistake, was reportedly sold out.

Three Cypriot participants withdrew from the festival in protest against Fabre’s participation – production house Humart, theatre group A Vendre, and venue Dance House Lefkosia at which the play would have been staged. It was rather ironic that these entities, inadvertently, cancelled themselves rather than Fabre. 

THE CAMPAIGN against Fabre, who was charged, tried and punished for his sex offences in Belgium in 2022, was led by a group named ‘afoa’, that pretentiously describes itself as “a political formation, of the broader radical space of Cyprus.”

Afoa is an acronym for – ‘autonomy, feminism, ecology (in Greek it starts with ‘o’) anti-capitalism.” And as traditional, morally virtuous leftists and feminists, afoa wanted to deny Fabre the right to work – even though he had been punished for his crimes in 2022 – in his profession ever again, because there must be “zero tolerance to gender and sexual violence in the arts and everywhere.”

Afoa and its fellow travellers may permit Fabre to clean toilets for a living, but work in the arts is forbidden and his inclusion in the festival raises questions. “Such festivals are symptoms of a deeply patriarchal and rotten society, in which all those with power and/or money think they can do whatever takes their fancy,” afoa said on its website.

It has to be said that the patriarchal festival organisers are offering our rotten society a bit of culture in contrast to the anti-capitalist, feminist ecologists who just like to moan.

THE AUTHORITIES must be feeling nostalgic for the authoritarianism of the lockdown era, otherwise they would not have prepared a bill that would allow cops to stop people in the street and make them undergo a drug or alcohol test.

This fascistic provision is included in a bill for dealing with football violence and it had the full support of our churchgoing Justice Minister Marios Hartsiotis, who defended it in the House last week. Police will have the power to stop anyone they like within 500 metres from a football stadium during a match day for a drug/alcohol test.

But is it a criminal offence to walk, run or dance drunk or stoned? It is not, so on what grounds would a cop stop someone walking 500m from a stadium and force them to have an alcotest? This is a police state measure that I would never have expected from the government of the smartest kid in the classroom.