Pity Sahra Wagenknecht, the attractive and enigmatic German “Left Party” Member of the European Parliament. Seems she was caught on camera ordering — and enjoying — a €22 lobster at restaurant in Alsatian France this week.

What’s an unreconstructed Stalinist to do when caught indulging in luxury? London’s Guardian newspaper tells the rest of the tale:

[Wagenknecht] set about trying to destroy the evidence of what happened that night in the Strasbourg restaurant Aux Armes …

[T]he day after the dinner Wagenknecht, 38, allegedly dispatched her parliamentary assistant to the office of Feleknas Uca, the photographer and fellow Left MEP who was one of six other Left members at the dinner. The assistant asked whether Uca would lend her her digital camera to “take photographs with an acquaintance.”

According to Uca, the photographs of Wagenknecht cracking into her lobster had been erased from the camera when it was returned to her the following day.

The German press are already comparing this to the tale of Klaus Kleinfeld, the Alcoa chief executive who (as a newly minted CEO of Siemens) had a $5,000 Rolex watch airbrushed out of his official company portrait in 2005. No sense aggravating the masses at the peak of their unemployment woes.

I’m also reminded of other Communists figuratively — and literally — airbrushed out of history. The great vanishing Leon Trotsky, for one, whose image vanished from official photos of seminal events in Soviet history around the time he was expelled in the Great Purge. Later, of course, he also got an ice pick in the skull.

It’s hard to imagine that Wagenknecht, who wrote her university thesis on Hegel and Marx and edited a book of essays a few years ago praising Hugo Chavez, doesn’t see the historical parallels. Or maybe she just really, really likes the color red.

I almost feel bad for British Immigration Minister Liam Byrne. But since he talks with a funny accent (and since the Dollar is down against the Pound) I guess I’ll just mock him instead.

Last year, before he was elevated to a cabinet post, Byrne was part of the UK Parliamentary Committee that doubled the fines for driving while talking on a hand-held cell phone. At the time, he testified:

“I was shocked as a new MP to hear example after example of drivers who had killed innocent people walking off with no more severe a penalty than six points on their license and a £150 to £300 fine. The most dangerous drivers are serial potential killers.“

Byrne is definitely a real road-safety crusader. (It says that he wants “safer roads” right on his website.) He even encourages drivers to use the UK government’s helpful website to snitch on their fellow motorists’ traffic transgressions.

And now this:

A Home Office minister who once warned MPs that Britain’s most dangerous drivers were “serial potential killers” faced accusations of hypocrisy today after pleading guilty to using a mobile phone while driving.

Liam Byrne, the Immigration Minister … was fined £100 with £30 costs and a £15 victim surcharge. He was also given three points on his licence, taking his current total up to six.

Don’t they have speakerphones in England?