The time is coming when the full story of my leaked email about the EU Budget and a Chinese alarm-clock will have to be told.

For now just to say that the story frisked round the Internet for a short while. I alas was not famous for even fifteen minutes. More like two minutes and eight seconds.

When a story gets picked up like this on a popular site, the comments from fans and surfers usually start by being focused on the story and then, like the statements from the spaceolined-out characters in I’m in Marsport without Hilda, meander away spontaneously but incoherently on to quite different topics before petering out in sad grunts, often of crude abuse.

So when I saw that I had made it on to the fine Samizdata site I was intrigued to see what would happen. 

There ensued a lively and self-disciplined discussion about whether one line in my leaked email about the CAP ("a programme which uses inefficient transfers of taxpayers money to bloat rich French landowners and so pump up food prices in Europe, thereby creating poverty in Africa, which we then fail to solve through inefficient but expensive aid programmes") was in fact true even though many people think it is.

How in theory might a massive EU farm subsidy programme create famine in Africa? And in practice does this happen?

Good questions. Here are some answers.