There’s gnome excuse for this ‘cheery’ chap

This week’s runaway winner in the Diary’s “Dodgy Marketing Idea” competition comes in an unusual form.

Spying a new business opportunity, Warwickshire company Heissner has come up with a novel way of promoting European Monetary Union in the UK – the “Euro Gnome”.

Heissner managing director Geoff Burrows says: “Businesses and school children across the country need to be educated about what the euro will mean to them and the Euro Gnome is a cheerful way to do this.”

“Cheerful” is one way of putting it. Burrows goes on to say the gnome portrays the euro in “a humorous and optimistic manner” and euro-sceptics are bound to agree.

Heissner can apparently model gnomes to look like real people. Could the prototype for the Euro Gnome possibly have been the foreign office’s own pro-euro little fellow, Robin Cook?