Sajid Javid has become the doormat Chancellor

Mario Draghi, who retired as president of the European Central Bank this week, was arguably the first holder of that office to win international respect for himself and his institution. The ECB’s founding chief, the downbeat Dutchman Wim Duisenberg, was undermined on all sides but especially by the French — who eventually succeeded in replacing him with their own Jean-Claude Trichet, whom no one remembers for much beyond meddling and posturing and the acquittal from scandal at home that freed him to take up the ECB job in the first place. But former Goldman Sachs executive and Italian central bank governor Draghi wrote himself into history on 26 July 2012, nine months after he took over from Trichet, with his promise to a gathering in London that: ‘Within our mandate, the ECB is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro. And believe me, it will be enough.’

It was indeed enough to calm eurozone turmoil and breathe new life into its bond markets. Since then, Draghi’s deployment of bond-buying programmes and negative interest rates to stave off deflation and recession has found plenty of critics — in Germany, where savers resent zero returns on deposit accounts, and among Eurosceptics who see his policies as desperate props for a failing economic model. But he can hardly be blamed for the refusal of most of Europe to reform and of Germany to inject fiscal stimulus. While EU leaders fudged and dodged, Draghi was a calm, authoritative presence at their shoulder; most importantly, markets took him seriously.

Grande dame

And what of Draghi’s successor, former IMF chief Christine Lagarde? Detractors point out that she’s a lawyer rather than an economist, that her record as France’s finance minister under Sarkozy was tainted by a conviction (without penalty) for ‘negligence with public money’ in l’affaire Tapie, and that her appointment is the result of the usual EU horse-trading: the Germans wanted their Bundesbank’s Jens Weidmann at the ECB but settled for Ursula von der Leyen as Commission president.