The return of Hitler and warm beer!

Welcome to Declassified, a weekly humor column.

This week’s winner of the Declassified Nominative Determinism Award (which is definitely a real thing) is Crispin Blunt — a former U.K. Conservative member of parliament who has been charged with drug offenses.

Previous winners of the award include Hennie de Haan, former head of the Dutch trade union of poultry farmers, Bulgarian hurdler Vania Stambolova, and urologists A. J. Splatt and D. Weedon, who wrote a medical research paper on incontinence.

Names are so important. Just imagine trying to win elected office in 2026 if your name was Hitler? It’d never happen … oh.

Yes, the first round of French municipal elections shone a spotlight on one Charles Hittler (that extra “t” isn’t really helping) — the mayor of Arcis-sur-Aube, southeast of Paris. And one of his opponents was called Zielinski (Antoine Renault-Zielinski, not Volodymyr). Though Hitler vs. Zelenskyy sounds like the kind of thing that only previously existed in fan fiction spawned from the darkest corners of the internet.

The French mayor isn’t the only Hit(t)ler on the political scene either. Last year, Adolf Hitler Uunona retained his seat in a local election in Namibia. After an earlier victory in 2020, he had told Bild he had no plans for domination, whether in the former German colony or globally.

“My father named me after this man. He probably didn’t understand what Adolf Hitler stood for,” the Namibian politician said, rather terrifyingly.

Hitler and Hittler aren’t alone in having names that should be electorally off-putting. There’s also Geoffrey Epstein, who ran unsuccessfully to be mayor of Framingham, Massachusetts last year, and is very clearly not the late convicted sex offender.

And if seeing the name Hittler on the ballot is an unwelcome reminder of days gone by, for many, so is the return of warm beer.

This week, Ed Miliband, the U.K. energy secretary, said pubs should serve warmer beer to save money on their energy bills.

New advice from Miliband’s department suggests fridges containing bottled beer be turned off overnight — welcome news for lovers of traditional ales with names like Drunken Badger or The King’s Slightly Tipsy, though less so for younger drinkers of cold European lagers called Prost Malone or Manneken Pissed.

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Thanks for all the entries. Here’s the best one from our mailbag — there’s no prize except the gift of laughter, which I think we can all agree is far preferable to cash or booze.

“And I thought Orbán was our bogeyman!”

by Tom Morgan