So perhaps the Torygraph's reports of a European Redemption Pact were a bit premature. Or maybe just wrong. I saw a German banker on Newsnight last night, eerily reminiscent of Hardy Kruger in The Flight of the Phoenix, explaining with patient complacency that Germany was willing to put in more money; it was just that there would always be a quid pro quo. In other words, social reforms. So maybe Merkel's coat-trailing of an ERP was just part of this process - jam tomorrow. If you're good. Of course all that ignores the fact that Greece and Spain have to live with this crushing austerity now. Hope that in five years things might be a bit better (or not) do not sustain people who aren't sure where their next meal is coming from.
Apologies if I've mentioned this before, but some Torygraph journalist - it might have been Jeremy Warner - wrote a while back that we've been standing on the edge of the abyss for so long that we might not have noticed that we are actually falling into it. I suspect that we probably now are falling into it, and that's what accounts for the vague feelings of hysteria and unreality which accompany the sight of the G20 leaders flailing around at a Mexican seaside resort. David Cameron apparently declined to be filmed in front of this scenic backdrop, and one can hardly blame him. No doubt he would much rather be at home than hobnobbing with people like the egregious Manuel Barroso, a bureaucrat of the first water whose bad-tempered reproof for President Obama carried with it a sense of outrage that the facts are, inexiplicably, refusing to conform to the scheme enthusiasts like him had planned for the Eurozone.
Those whom the Gods wish to destroy . . .
