OK -- the gloves are off -- time for the smelly cheese jokes

By Aussiegirl

The staid
and serious G-8 meeting, which was kicked off with such dignity and
depth by the Live-8 concerts (although with some of those old geezers
one wondered if Live was quite the adjective one was looking for) --
"Hey man, this is the greatest thing ever organized in the history of
the world!" (presumably that leaves out D-Day and the Berlin airlift)
--
has degenerated into a catty food fight.

First that snooty Chirac, the sly Putin and the eager Schroeder yucked
it up over the dreadfulness of English cooking including Haggis (OK -
Haggish is Scottish), getting in for good measure a slam at the
American
hamburger (although they did admit that English cooking was even worse
than the hamburger).

Now Jack Straw has weighed in with his own nasty haggis jokes.

Well all I can say is Chirac has little room to talk -- at least the
English and the Scots don't cook and eat slimy leaping amphibians and
gastropod mollusks.

JACK Straw, the Foreign Secretary, sailed into a fresh food
fight last night when he declared that Jacques Chirac had been right to
deride Scotland's national dish.

Mr Straw was overheard telling colleagues that: "Chirac was right about
the haggis", at his Westminster gym yesterday morning.

The French president's jibes had provoked outrage earlier this week
after he was overheard telling his Russian and German counterparts that
he could not trust a country with such bad food.

Mr Straw made the joke while he was taking part in an exercise bike
class at the popular House of Commons gym early yesterday.

When contacted by The Scotsman, the Foreign Office said it had to admit
to a rare lapse in his diplomatic prowess.

"We got caught guv," his spokesman said - making no attempt to retract
the Foreign Secretary's disparaging remarks. "It is time for us to duck
our heads below the parapet, we are not saying anything more on it."

Mr Chirac was overheard by a French newspaper reporter denouncing
haggis
while at a four-way diplomatic summit - even claiming that his distaste
for haggis sparked the demise of France's relationship with NATO. Lord
Robertson, its former secretary general, had made him try an
"unappetising" Scottish delicacy", the French president told his
counterparts. "That is where our problems with NATO come from."

Mr Straw's spokesman did not say whether the Foreign Secretary endorsed
Mr Chirac's view that the haggis offer was to blame for the breakdown
in
relations.

"He was having a bit of fun on the nature of haggis," he said last
night. "I don't think he would like us to draw any conclusions from
that."

In contrast to Mr Straw and Mr Chirac's distaste for Scotland's iconic
delicacy, a robust defence of haggis was mounted in the Commons.

Eleanor Laing, the Shadow Scottish Secretary suggested that Tony Blair
assure Mr Chirac at the G8 summit that Scotland's agriculture and food
production was "a major economic asset".