The crisis has been tough on the European Commission

Single Markets Commissioner Charlie McCreevy, who sneered at the idea of reading the Lisbon Treaty and who was Minister for Finance in the critical period when Ireland's tech boom became a property bubble, living it up at the Cheltenham race meeting yesterday. That purple tag is presumably his special box access.

Apparently Queen Elizabeth was in the box above Charlie's. This ability of the Irish privileged class to locate themselves below the English elite is a critical element of their faux populism, and is as persistent a consequence of our period in the UK on Irish politics as the Northern Ireland situation.

Photograph: Alan Betson