‘Will Greece exit the eurozone in 2015?’ Paddy Power was pricing ‘yes’ at 3-to-1 on Tuesday, with 5-to-2 on another Greek general election within the year and 6-to-4 on the more cautious ‘Greece to adopt an official currency other than the euro by the end of 2017.’ I’m no betting man — as I reminded myself after backing a parade of point-to-point losers on Sunday — and I defer to our in-house speculator Freddy Gray, who will offer a wider guide to political bets worth having in the forthcoming Spectator Money (7 March).
But on the Greek card I’m tempted by the longer odds on the shorter timeframe, because this has the feeling of a crisis that’s close to denouement, and because prime minister Tsipras and tieless finance minister Varoufakis are wannabe revolutionaries (‘latter-day Trotskyites’, as Ken Clarke called them) rather than responsible national leaders. The pro-European Clarke says ‘I can’t see how you can sensibly avoid the Greeks defaulting and having to leave the eurozone,’ while former US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan — always worth listening to, despite the post-crash fall of his previously godlike reputation — says, ‘It’s just a matter of time before everyone recognises that parting is the best strategy.’
Perhaps even more illuminating is the Irish commentator Fintan O’Toole’s proposed T-shirt slogan ‘We are not Greece’, signifying a lack of solidarity with Greek anti-austerity demands on the part of Ireland, which has gone through austerity and come out the other side. That’s the tone of mainstream opinion in Portugal and Spain too, despite noises off from the left. A White House official most of us had not heard of before, deputy national security adviser Caroline Atkinson, has been one of the few international voices urging compromise.
The truth is that this is no longer widely seen as a case of Germany being selfishly brutal to Greece. Rather, we’re watching a Greek regime behaving like student occupiers threatening to torch the university unless their wildly unrealistic demands are met. Pretty soon, the vice-chancellor will have to stop trying to talk sense into them through a megaphone, and the monetary riot police will have to move in. Greek rejection of the latest EU deadline proposal as ‘absurd’ was surely a signal to put the water cannons on standby. I’d be astonished if sherpas from Brussels, the IMF, the European Central Bank and other key institutions are not closeted in a basement in Basel or Frankfurt at this very moment, working out how to limit Grexit damage. In the words of Damon Runyan, oft quoted here by my predecessor Christopher Fildes: ‘The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that’s the way to bet.’
This is an extract from Martin Vander Weyer’s column in this week’s Spectator.
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