The only decent jobs left are Eurocrat and shoemaker

Welcome to Declassified, a weekly humor column.

Some 170,000 people applied for as few as 1,500 EU jobs as part of the first hiring cycle for generalists in seven years.

That’s a lot of people with dreams of sitting in an office building, listening to the Brussels birdsong that is the clang and crash of a construction site, breaking the lunchtime monotony by grabbing a sandwich with an inexplicable amount of grated carrot in it. There’s also job security, benefits and a lot of money, of course. Oh, and even a strong belief in the European ideal (cue images of butterflies and a chorus of cherubs singing).

Applying for a role you have a vanishingly small chance of getting is rather terrifying, but at least it shows that there’s interest in a relatively old-fashioned type of job rather than, say, reviewing sandwiches on social media (and in this divided world, I’d hope we can all agree on immediate jail sentences for people who review sandwiches on social media).

Another old-school job that’s clearly doing well — thanks to noted fashion expert U.S. President Donald Trump — is shoemaking. Apparently the American leader has been forcing his aides to wear $145 Florsheim dress shoes. “All the boys have them,” a female White House official told the Wall Street Journal, which wrote the shoe story. “It’s hysterical because everybody’s afraid not to wear them,” another joked in the same piece.

Incidentally, Michael Jackson also wore Florsheim shoes. Trump and Jackson! That either means the company has great PR or terrible PR, depending on your point of view.

Anyway, the great shoe giveaway led to photos of U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio wearing a pair that are clearly far too big for him. It’s like an Oval Office version of Cinderella, where the person whose foot fits the shoe gets to go to the (golden) ball with Prince Uncharming.

At the time of writing, Rubio hadn’t thrown a shoe — or shoes — at Trump in the manner of Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi, who in 2008 hurled his footwear at then-U.S. president George W. Bush at a press conference in Baghdad. Though Vice President JD Vance did once reveal that Trump said: “You know, you can tell a lot about a man by his shoe size.” Indeed you can, mainly his height.

Perhaps Trump will now look more favorably on Margrethe Vestager, the former European commissioner he described as that “tax lady” who “really hates the U.S.,” after she fined Apple $14 billion over illegal tax breaks. As POLITICO reported last year, Vestager now has her own line of shoes — the Margrethe Boot from shoe company Roccamore — and she’s even been modeling them on billboards.

But at least Vestager looks cool. In 2024, Rishi Sunak — hurtling toward the end of his tenure as British prime minister — apologized to fans of Adidas Samba sneakers after being accused of ruining their credibility when he was pictured wearing a pair. Even worse, David Cameron — best known for being accused of putting his genitals into a dead pig’s mouth, but who you may also remember for Brexit and as one of Sunak’s predecessor’s as British prime minster — was once pictured in a pair of black Velcro Converse.

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“Von der Leyen reassures new Dutch PM that she has his back.”

by David Kemp