WITH Iron Chancellor Merkel delivering the first non-surprise and T. Blair belatedly the second, the only surprising feature of the past week’s two major events was that anyone was actually surprised.

Dave, of course, had to pretend he was surprised when the Eiserne Kanzler lined 'em all up at Westminster and declared that our Pudding PM had less chance of twisting her arm over EU reform than getting Hattie Harperson to say 'sorry’.

But come on Dave, we’ve long known that your bogus referendum promise was spiked by the fact that we can’t compel our EU partners to negotiate a new relationship without invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. And Article 50 can only be invoked by asking to leave the EU, something Dave refuses to countenance. Ding dong, Catch 22 and even the muppet MPs not listening to Frau M. through headphones got the message.

Non-surprise number two was when John Downey walked from the Old Bailey thanks to a murky peace-at-any-cost deal done to seal the Good Friday Agreement by writing to 187 of the IRA’s so called on-the-runs, suspected of the most heinous crimes but mates of the Republican leadership, informing them they were in the clear. Only a fan of black humour would query how you’d write to someone on the run, but there you go.

Naturally, Yo Blair was involved, as he was later when invading Iraq on a lie, something ironically being thrown back in his successors’ faces this week while Putin annexed Crimea. Incidentally, in 1998 when the most bellicose Prime Minister in Britain’s history became the first to address the Dail in Dublin, one line from his speech went: “But too often between us, one person’s history has been another person’s myth.”

Arguably the biggest beneficiary of the Good Friday Agreement was Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams, who still surprises men like convicted IRA killer Peter Rogers by denying they were ever comrades. Mr Rogers told a journalist at the weekend: “It amazes me about Gerry. He made that statement himself, but for a man that was never in the IRA he seemed to dress up for every funeral that he went to in IRA regalia. What was that for, to impress people?”

Whatever, even Gerry must have been surprised when he agreed to a Q&A on Twitter with our Enniskillen sister paper The Impartial Reporter last week and one of the tweets was: “When you go swimming does the 'No bombing’ rule rankle with you?”