"When a clown moves into a palace..." [CORRECTION]

 

"When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn't become king. The palace becomes a circus."

~ Turkish proverb [Hat tip Monica B.]

UPDATE: 

CORRECTION:  So it isn't a Turkish proverb. Well, not exactly, anyway. It's an old saying tweaked by British writer Elizabeth Bangs -- and it's a fascinating story of its own, full of political arrests, journalists gone bad, and memes gone wrong. She writes:

“There is a famous saying,” Turkish Journalist Sedef Kabaş declared in a live broadcast on the 14th January 2022, “‘A crowned head will get wiser.’” She continued, “But we see that this isn’t the reality. There is also a saying that is the exact opposite: ‘When cattle go into a palace they don’t become the king, but the palace becomes a barn’.”
    On Friday evening, January 21st, she repeated the saying on Twitter and Instagram, in slightly different form, adding that it was a Circassian proverb (in Turkish: öküz saraya çıkınca kral olmaz, ama saray ahır olur). At 2 a.m. that Saturday morning, she was detained for ‘insulting’ the Turkish President, which is as strong an admission that she’d hit the mark as it’s possible to imagine.
    Two days later, Sunday 23rd January, I sat at my kitchen table and read about the arrest. It struck me immediately that the saying also had resonance in the UK’s political moment. I read several translations, with ox, bull, stable, barn and so on and for a second or two, considered settling on the best I could find. But, something didn’t quite speak to our situation. The old rural analogy using a heavy, slow bull or ox in his barn or stable was not a perfect fit, when transplanted to contemporary British politics. I needed something more biting, more apposite. The proverb was quickly reworked and 8.36 a.m. it became:
    When a clown moves into a palace, he does not become a king. The palace becomes a circus....

You won't believe what happened next! [>>>READ ON]