Mario smiles through gritted teeth
Everyone’s gagging to investigate. But the truth of life is clear
There was a terrific literal on the Telegraph’s website this morning: the DT said that certain bankers in the US would be ‘investigagged’. If the current econo-fiscal balls-up does indeed change the commercial culture of the West, then one would expect it to start at the linguistic level. Saying or writing time after time that such and such a villain has been ‘investigated and gagged’ becomes tiresome, and thus a new word emerges: investigagged.
Chris Huhne is a slightly different case, in that he was investigated, but his former wife has been gagged. Big, big mistake for him to then start nesting somewhere else, because as all we chaps know, Hell hath no fury. The CPS is going to tell us tomorrow whether they have decided that Huhne has been punished enough, or whether they think he should be banged up. I’m in the latter camp myself, but anyway at 10.00am we’re going to know. I have no inside track to offer on this, but I do recall Slick Nick on the telly some months back saying that “Chris was absolutely clear with me, and gave me his word, that there was no truth to the allegations”. I severely doubt if Clegg accepts that tosh, and for myself I truly do not believe that even an insanely jealous ex-wife would make all this up: her story rings true. That said, if the CPS agrees and formally charges this slippery MP, then the Deputy PM will be put into a very small, hard corner full of jagged flintstones. I can’t see it myself, but we must all cross things and hope.
One woman who has been investigated and should be gagged is Chancellor Angela Merkel. As The Slog suggested last Monday, there are at the very least lingering doubts about how she has airbrushed the nastier side of her careerism out of history. The point of that expose was not salacious anti-Germanism, but rather to try and encourage people – especially the Germans themselves – to ask exactly who this woman really is. Little Geli is, after all, the EU’s all-purpose leader and representative: she likes treading on other people’s sovereignty, belittling Sarkozy, lecturing latins, and brushing British opinion aside.
For a German leader to behave like this could be put down to sheer coincidence, were it not for the fact that her history does suggest she is one of life’s sociopathic shafters. But whatever history does or doesn’t decide about the Good Frau Doktor, she is currently doing her bit to try and flog the EFSF to the Chinese. As I write, the Fuhrerine is in Beijing rather than Berlin, licking Wen Jaibao all over because the completely ineffectual Klaus Regling has failed to get anyone to sign up for bazooka ammo.
I quite like Mr Wen; I’m sure he’s been a ruthless old fascist in his day, but he does enjoy winding up the ever-pompous fangwoi. He has told the West over and over again that he will pile in with all hands to the eurozone problem if – and only if – the other EU members take the lead in this. Such a promise remains safe for all conceivable time (as Wen knows) because most of the 27 EU States are broke. Their joining together to survive doesn’t change the simple equation of 27 x 0 = 0. Equally important, Wen Jaibao has problems of his own: China is bang on target for a “hard landing” this year. A Chinese Government report yesterday showed that export orders fell last month. Although output expanded, orders are futures and output is now. The Slog’s 201o prediction about China may be up to a year behind schedule, bit it’s still sound. So in that context, Merkel’s first class ticket may well represent the biggest waste of money since euromeltdown began.
A chap happy to gag himself (although he may well need investigating) is Mario Draghi. A former Goldman insider told me last year, “Mario is more discreet than a stone, and sharper than a knife”. He’s needed both qualities to work his way through the minefield of EU disintegration thus far – Berlin v Paris v Greeks v Bondholders v ECB – but there is a degree of dissembling going on right now that disturbs me. The ECB is “not party” to ongoing discussions between the Greek government and the private sector, Draghi said on January 19th. That clearly isn’t true. In turn, Mario has insisted that the ECB “will not take a haircut” on Greek debt, which directly contradicts what a senior bondholding negotiator told me on several occasions over the last three weeks. The idea that Mario Draghi values his ECB breaking even on the Greek junk it holds above eurozone survival is nonsense. Like all smart people, he must play the long game, and weigh losses in battle against the objective of winning the war. Sorry to sound like a broken record-groove here, but ‘Listen not to what they say, but rather watch what they do’.
This say/do mismatch is what most good journalism is about. It is the duty of all commentators to point out, in an amenable way, how the words our leaders spout often bear little resemblance to what they really believe. Belief turns into action. Cheap talk turns into nothing substantive. Such is the problem of our media-dominated culture.
Anyway, it’s time to switch off for the day. It has been -3 degrees down here today, but stunningly clear:
We took the dogs for a long walk. We yelled instructions at them. They obeyed or otherwise. We met other people, we smiled, we talked about the views, the weather, and the dogs. It was all very, very clear. Real life is, I find.
The Slog 