Romney, the weird rich kid peeing in everyone’s pool

FIRST we had George W Bush being misunderestimated, now we have Mitt Romney being mischaracterised.

I had to look it up, but apparently the word does actually exist, no matter how wrong it sounds. A bit like Romney who has spent the past week giving a masterclass in how to lose friends and alienate people on his first ever foreign tour.

’Your Olympics are rubbish,’ he told the British, just as seven years worth of intense preparation was about to come to a spectacular head. Oh boy. When you find yourself sharing a sense of righteous outrage with Eton Toryboys like David Cameron and Boris Johnson, you know things are bad. Why was Mitt there in the first place? It was like inviting the weird rich kid to your party, more out of wary politeness than sincerity, only for him to smush your cupcakes and pee in your brand new pool.

Then Mitt, girded in his Mormon undergarments which he believes will protect him from fire, bullets and the power of Satan – but sadly not the British press, nor Twitter, where the tag #RomneyShambles trended solidly for two days — proceeded to crash land in Israel. Israel, he said, was better at making money than Palestine because of its culture. “Culture makes all the difference,” he said. Culture? Great big walls and military suppression more like. It was a bit like saying famine was caused by a lack of Krispy Kreme outlets.

And another thing, he reassured Israelis — feel free to nuke Iran.

But by then he’d skipped off to Poland, where Solidarity did their best to avoid him, given his fondness for kicking trades unions in the face.

Meanwhile, back in London, Rafalca Romney will have done her thing this week. Rafalca, as you know, is Mrs Romney’s horse. This is the same Mrs Romney who recently told the American public, “We’ve given you people all you need to know” about the family’s tax millions. And Rafalca is not just any old horse – she’s a dressage horse, for whom the Romneys got a $77,000 tax credit. This compares with $1,000 tax credit you get for a child in America. Which is fine – she is, after all, a particularly splendid horse who does lovely horse ballet, whereas the average American family do little other than struggle to stay employed and never get sick, because unlike Rafalca, they don’t have free healthcare. Let’s hope Americans think long and hard about that horse in November.

@soozysuze