Politics

The Eurozone is a kind of lunacy if you look at it as an economic project. But this isn’t about economics, or rationality — it’s about emotion, as the leader in today’s Telegraph says. The Brits and Americans often fail to understand this fully because we judge a currency union in terms of its economic merits. But many European nations see it as part of another, wider, agenda. For the Spanish and Portuguese it’s about not going back to dictatorship. For Greece it’s about being Western rather than Eastern (and not being run by the military). As John O’Sullivan wrote for The Spectator recently, Eastern European states still — even

I doubt that Angela Merkel is looking forward to the G8 summit very much. It will mostly consist of the other world leaders telling her to give ground on austerity. But I suspect that Merkel won’t budge much, if at all. She clearly believes that the Greeks can be whipped into line by telling them that the election is really a referendum on euro membership. Hence both her suggestion of a simultaneous referendum on election-day and her backing for the European Central Bank cutting off support to Greek banks which shows that while there’s no formal mechanism for ejecting a country from the single currency there are ways of doing

Even as our attention is gripped by a crumbling eurozone, another huge economic entity is emerging in the marketplace — Facebook, which has just upsized its number of IPO shares by a quarter before its $100 billion flotation tomorrow. Providing the crisis in Europe does not blow out into a huge political standoff (and just stays the gigantic economic mess it currently is), which entity would future historians regard as the defining business model of our age? Both the eurozone and Facebook, in a way, try to deal with the problems of geography — how to connect people from different places and cultures. But they do it in radically different

The 1922 elections were not a clean sweep for the loyalist 301 Group slate, they missed out on one of the secretary position. But they have pretty much succeeded in purging the ’22 and the Backbench Business Committee of the so-called ‘wreckers’. Indeed, the only ‘wrecker’ who has survived is Bernard Jenkin who remains on the ’22 executive. But, significantly, I understand that Stewart Jackson, who spoke up in defence of Nadine Dorries at ’22 last week and was very critical of David Cameron at the weekend, came — in the words of one who has seen the actual voting numbers — ‘within a whisker’ of being elected to the