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While the barman was ejecting some difficult guests last night someone switched channels on the TV above the bar to a news show. The sound was on. They were talking about Afghanistan. It seems that Barack Obama gave prime minister Donald a bell and Don immediately agreed to send another hundred thousand or half a million Polish soldiers out east. The burning question was: was Donald’s haste in agreeing to send in more men hasty enough to be deemed “unseemly”? The more fundamental question of whether Poland should be fighting in Afghanistan was raised, it’s true, but the answers revolved – quite openly, none of your false Western hypocrisy here – around: what’s in it for Poland? Apparently, Warsaw is less likely to be bombed by terrorists if Polish soldiers are being bombed in Afghanistan. That seems pretty much to be the answer to the all important question of what’s in it for Poland.

I still don’t think it’s a scandal but since it has driven everything (even Roman Polański) off the TV screens, here’s some more about the Zbig Chlebowski affair (see here), going mainly on Robert Walenciak’s article in the current Przegląd. The businessmen in question are Ryszard Sobiesiak of Casino Polonia and Golden Play and Jan Kosek of Casino Centrum ATT. The politicians in question are, at last count, Chlebowski, Drzewiecki, Schetyna, Szejnfeld, Czuma and Prime Minister Donald Tusk. The bill in question is one that would affect the gambling industry and has been working its way through the parliamentary system for months. One section of it proposes a “charge” on low-stake gambling machines (one-armed bandits) which is really just a tax. The PiS-friendly (more later) Central Anti-Corruption (CBA) Bureau tapped Sobiesiak’s phone and last week released transcripts to the PiS-friendly newspaper Rzeczpospolita in which Chlebowski was heard bragging that he had successfully blocked the taxation provision of the bill for a year but that it was hard work and it would be great if “Miro” and “Gześ” would help out. As I mentioned before, “Miro” and “Gześ” are thought to be references to the minister for sport and the deputy prime minister but Chlebowski knows many people of those names and cannot now remember which he meant – an excuse surely even a nine-year old would be ashamed to advance. So a businessman wanted a tax lifted from his business and the pro-business ruling party agrees to it. The sheep bleated for a low-tax party and a low-tax party is what they bah-bah bloody well got.

The scandal is really in the CBA’s actions. They leaked “operational materials” in an ongoing investigation to a newspaper. Why? Had they decided that Sobiesiak and Chlebowski were not under suspicion and that no crime had been committed? Tusk comes into the picture in August, which is when CBA chief Mariusz Kamiński (appointed by current opposition party PiS some years ago) told him what was going on. Some time later Sobiesiak stopped using phones and now people are speculating that Tusk warned him off or that maybe the CBA warned him off in order to make it look as if Tusk had warned him off. Such are the people Poles choose to have run their country for them. Look at the timing: this bombshell is dropped, scuttling, one presumes, any chance of bringing criminal charges against Chlebowski, which after all is the CBA’s job, just as Kamiński goes on trial for, among other things, faking documents in an investigation designed to entrap politicians. Also, presidential elections are just over a year away and it looks like Tusk (PO) will compete with Kaczyński (PiS).

Opinion polls indicate that people want the heads of Chlebowski (head of the PO “klub”*), Drzewiecki (minister for sport), Schetyna (deputy PM), Szejnfeld (a deputy minister in finances) and Czuma (minister for justice), but in all fairness I think that people, quite sensibly, support the resignation of any and all politicians as a matter of principle. If the pollsters had asked them should Barack Obama resign many would have said yes.

* No Pole I have ever encountered has been able to tell me what is meant by “klub” in this context.

I am proud and happy to report that I fell for all five April Fool’s jokes in the last Nie bar one.
That Jarosław Kaczynski paid a state visit to the US instead of his (identical twin) brother and president of Poland, Lech? Sure, why not?
That Minister Wasserman wanted to drain a lake in memory of Pope John Paul II?
That you can buy a paint that, applied to your car, eludes detection by police radars? Yes, I fell for that too, though in my defence, I assumed the paint didn’t work - only that people believed it did and were buying it.
That no ducks had died of H5N1 in Poland yet? Well, why wouldn’t you believe it? (There’s a complicated pun here on the word for duck and the names Kaczyński and Donald Tusk of the PO.)
That Andrzej Lepper, populist peasant leader, actually comes from an aristocratic background? Real life loves irony no less than writers.

Nothing is too absurd for Polish politics and life not to be true.

British public life is more staid, or perhaps its journalists less inventive, because all the Guardian could manage was a story that Chris Martin from Coldplay had gone Tory. Naturally I fell for that too. I’d have been a fool not to.