Alan Duncan predicts partial Greek default

On Any Questions, Alan Duncan—a minister of state at the Department to International Development and a longstanding ally of the Foreign Secretary William Hague—has just predicted a partial Greek default. He told the programme that ‘I guess what’s going to happen is there will be a partial default and some kind of agreement’.

There have long been rumours in Westminster that the British government’s position was now to—in private—push for an orderly default. Indeed, George Osborne’s comment in his Telegraph interview today that the eurozone “need to end this endless speculation about Greece — they have got to come to a decision and stick to it” implied that. But ministers have previously avoided commenting directly on whether or not Greece would default on the grounds that it was not appropriate for the government to speculate. Duncan has just ended that strategy.