Image: CourtneyuttIt was the most delicious morsel of the Front National's seriously overcooked polemic on halal meat production in the Ile de France region, that is to say the Paris metropolitan area.
Marine Le Pen was still busy defending her manufactured row when the bombshell dropped.
Recap: a television report had found that of the four slaughterhouses in the region, one dealt in pork and the other three produced halal meat. That is to say, the animals are not stunned before slaughter.
From this, Miss Le Pen calculated that all the meat distributed in the capital was halal. But that presupposes that the abattoirs in question provide exclusively for Parisian needs whereas they supply only a tiny fraction of them. The rest, clearly (and we are talking about 97.5 per cent), goes elsewhere and such mighty farming regions as Normandy and Burgundy send meat to please the fussy Parisian palate.
When her mistake was pointed out, by left and (mainstream) right, wicked old Jean-Marie's daughter simply changed tack. Now, it was a case of "how can we know?" since, she claimed, the meat was not labelled to ensure buyers would be aware of the methods used.
And then, just as she was beginning to look a little absurd, her party colleague Paul Lamoitier entered the fray.
A newspaper in the north of France reported that he had resigned from the party because of the controversy. Not only was M Lamoitier a councillor in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region; he was also, as a wholesale butcher, one of its major suppliers of - you guessed it - halal meat.
Isn't there someone at the Mail who'd say "you couldn't make it up" ... ?
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