You couldn’t make it up. The vote on an amendment to some “orphan works” legislation in the EU’s Legal Affairs committee (which has the responsibility of “safeguarding the integrity and trustworthiness of the legal framework as a whole in Europe”) was lost 14 votes to 12. Nothing wrong with that, except that there were only 23 voting members. In other words, there was a 113% turnout – a figure of which Vladimir Putin or Robert Mugabe would be proud.

When it was pointed out that these 3 phantom votes could have affected the outcome, a re-vote was nevertheless denied.

Front-runner for “understatement of the year” goes to Christian Engström, Member of the European Parliament for the Swedish Pirate Party, who said:

“What can I say? There is a lot of room for improvement when it comes to democracy in the European Union.”