The Finnish press has been amusing itself at the expense of the young (32 when made party leader), blond, reasonably good-looking, newish leader of the social democratic party, Jutta Urpilainen.

The reason is that in the television broadcast of the local authority elections she answered every single interview question with the same hackneyed phrase that "First I would like to thank the people who worked on behalf of the party and all our voters" (something roughly like that but even longer!) before going on to put some spin on what actually for her party was a bit of a disaster.

(Vote percentage for that party down by several percentage points compared to the previous local authority elections, yet (spin) second largest party (just!) whereas they were the third largest party in the previous general election [held after the previous local authority elections].)

Said once the phrase was of course OK, but repeated every single time it quickly became less OK.

Various people have put up edited "highlights" from that broadcast on You Tube all of which consist of a slightly different question to a slightly different constellation of people and her identical starter phrase.

Finnish newspapers were not slow to pick this up (very soon over a quarter of a million people (out of a country of 5+ million) had seen the You Tube extracts) and the comment of one person to one such set of extracts that now Finland has it's own Sarah Palin.

However the best comment I read was from a Finnish humourist this weekend. It went something like this ...

"They say that blondes can only remember one thing at a time. This is nonsense. Blondes can remember many things at a time - provided they are the same thing".

... and with that I think I'll leave you ...

P.S. The Finnish elections were covered on one channel in the Swedish language and they naturally also interviewed the party leaders.

I didn't watch that channel on the night but YouTube also has a question being put to Jutta Urpilainen in Swedish and her responding in (extremely heavily accented) Swedish that "First I would like to thank the people who worked on behalf of the party and all our voters" !

P.P.S. One of the YouTube Finnish language pieces has the title "Jutta Urpilainen, part 2". In it she has changed her reply. It now goes "As I said before, first I would like to thank the people who worked on behalf of the party and all our voters"!