Don't mention the war

This news is one of those stories where you don't know if you should laugh or cry.

Apparently Express newspapers owner Richard Desmond went a bit mad in a meeting with his executives yesterday. For those who don't follow British newspaper politics, Desmond recently dropped out of the race to buy Daily Telegraph group - and one of the current prospective Telegraph buyers is a German newspaper group. But to the story - it seems that Desmond started off the meeting with moderately mild anti-German banter, moving on to claiming that they were all Nazis, and by the time Telegraph executives left the meeting he was singing "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles" with his Express colleagues while making sieg hail's and Hitler moustaches with his fingers.

His representatives are saying that Mr. Desmond's language is always colourful and that this was really just an average meeting with him.

But the image in my head is the "Germans" episode of Faulty Towers with John Cleese. "You started it!" - "No we bloody didn't, you invaded Poland!"

(Some details in this entry are based on a radio interview on the Today program this morning with one of the executives present.)