Any Other Business: I’d rather be disciplined by Madame Lagarde than governed by Labour’s truth-deniers

I’m not quite as bowled over by IMF chief Christine Lagarde as the BBC’s Robert Peston seems to be, but I’m an admirer — and I’m finding it hard to shake off a mental image of her as a teenage member of the French synchronised swimming team. That apart, she’s almost alone on the world stage in talking such carefully measured common sense about the financial crisis, including her remark that the Greeks should help themselves by paying their taxes. Fat-cat Greek socialist leader Evangelos Venizelos called that an ‘insult’, but the truth is that his fellow citizens’ misfortune is far more of their own making than it is the product of bond market brutality or German economic imperialism, and someone needs to keep saying so.

She was also right to endorse George Osborne’s deficit reduction strategy — for that’s unequivocally what she did, with a caveat that more stimulus will be needed if ‘the stresses in the euro area’ make matters even worse.