Ben Brogan spots this gem from an interview with the Prime Minister of Luxembourg, Jean-Claude Juncker: Gordon Brown “begged” to turn up at the Eurozone meeting last week.
Brown desperately wanted to turn up so that could present to a domestic audience this carefully crafted image of Brown the Saviour, the man called in to advise the Eurozone lot. But as Juncker says in the interview:
This, of course, shows the naked politics behind all this: if Mandelson is advising Brown, he’s doing so brilliantly. I have read the Wall Street Journal cover to cover today, without seeing a single mention of the Brown plan. Paul Krugman only called it that because he couldn’t stomach the idea of giving credit to the Bush administration. In France it’s called the Sarkozy Plan.“The British prime minister had to beg to be let into the room in which the euro group was meeting. I’m sure that when the storm is over, the British will think about whether they shouldn’t become an equal in all decision-making bodies.’”
Anyway, Britain couldn’t get in the euro if it begged at the moment: post-Brown UK government finances won’t meet the Maastricht criteria for many years to come.
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