In a development that has shaken the foreign office to its very cocktail cabinet, His Majesty’s Ambassador to Venezuela has declared the current crisis in Caracas the ‘hardest moment in the country’s modern history’. One can only assume he has forgotten the 2019 blackouts, the 2018 hyperinflation, and the 2017 helicopter attack on the Supreme Court. But let’s not quibble when there’s a perfectly good gin and tonic to be nursed.
The ambassador, speaking from what I can only presume is a reinforced bunker lined with Fortnum’s hampers, delivered his statement with the gravity of a man who has just been told the hotel mini-bar is out of tonic water. ‘This is the hardest moment in Venezuela’s modern history,’ he declared, as if the previous 47 hardest moments were mere dress rehearsals. One imagines the local population, who have been living through a prolonged humanitarian catastrophe, will be relieved to hear that now, at last, things have reached their most harrowing peaks.
Let us examine this ‘hardest moment’. Is it the ongoing political paralysis? The crumbling infrastructure? The exodus of millions? No, my friends, I suspect the true source of the ambassador’s angst is the abrupt scarcity of decent British crisps in the embassy canteen. For what else could drive a man to deploy such hyperbolic language? A man who has doubtless weathered Brexit negotiations, Trumpian trade wars, and the Great Gin Shortage of 2021 now faces his Waterloo: a Venezuela without functional plumbing.
But credit where it is due. The ambassador’s declaration is a masterclass in diplomatic understatement. After all, why mince words when you can mince the entire history of a nation into a single soundbite? The Venezuelan people, who have been contending with a collapsing economy, political repression, and a pandemic, will surely take comfort in knowing that a British official has finally acknowledged their suffering. Even if that acknowledgment comes wrapped in the same language one might use to describe a delayed flight from Gatwick.
As I pen this dispatch from my own locale, a pub of dubious hygiene in the London suburbs, I raise a glass to the ambassador. May his gin stay cold, his tonic be fizzy, and his moments remain merely hard, rather than impossible. For when the history of this crisis is written, let it be remembered as the time when a British diplomat, clutching a gin and tonic, became the oracle of Caracas. Cheers to that.
