Yes, he would have done better to keep his cool. Yes, he should have remembered that gibes, particularly barbed-wire ones, sting hardest in translation. Yes, he must have known that telling a German that he would be right for a bit movie part as a Nazi concentration camp “trusty” was not going to add to the sum of brotherly love. But there is a sickening hypocrisy about the righteous harrumphing in Berlin, where Gerhard Schröder stooped to the stagey ploy of putting calls from Rome on hold, and about the pompous strutting in Strasbourg of the offended “dignity” of the...