Five British Tory MEPs could have been killed or seriously injured if the European Parliament had been in session the day the roof fell in last month, an official inquiry revealed.
An Irish Fine Gael MEP would have also been in the path of tonnes of debris and steel girders which crashed into the empty debating chamber in Strasbourg during the August holiday.
Now, as repair work continues and construction experts search for the cause, the preliminary report identified 77 MEPs whose seats in the chamber were destroyed by masonry and ironwork.
As MEPs always sit in the same numbered seats, 77 individuals were pondering what might have been if the accident had happened at another time.
By chance the part of the ceiling which broke away was mostly an area where most seats are occupied by MEPs of the centre-right European People's Party, which includes the British Tory Euro-MPs.
The seats of five of the Tories - Caroline Jackson (South West of England), Sajjad Karim (North West), Timothy Kirkhope (Yorkshire and the Humber), London MEP Sayed Kamall, and Scotland's John Purvis, were among the 77 which took direct hits, the report said.
So was the seat of Irish Fine Gael MEP Gay Mitchell, also a member of the EPP Group.
Mr Kamall joked: "Putting a dodgy roof over the MEPs who are Brussels' biggest critics is taking their campaign to eliminate criticism of the European project a bit too far."
Then he lashed out at what he claimed were lax safety standards, saying: "Britain has been beset with red tape from Eurocrats on health and safety for the past 20 years. Yet they can't even make their own buildings safe. It is time we stopped the ridiculous MEPs' merry-go-round which involves us having to move our offices from the Brussels Parliament to the Strasbourg Parliament every month."
The ceiling accident occurred on August 7, in the one month when MEPs do not meet.
