Contagion of a different kind as Greece wriggles off the hook

The clear winner in the Greek crisis is the author of The Little Book of Negotiating Clichés, whose royalties must have been pouring in as the clock ticked towards midnight while European leaders took positive steps back from the brink and found themselves speaking the same language, perhaps because they were reading from the same page. But assuming this predictable dance results in terms that Prime Minister Tsipras can persuade his comrades to accept before the IMF’s default deadline and the moment when the Greek banking system can no longer seek life-support from the European Central Bank — which is all still quite a big assumption — who will be the loser?

Opinion now divides between those, including me, who think the euro will be more robust and durable if it parts company with Greece, and that the risk of ‘Grexit’ contagion across southern Europe is negligible; those who think the single currency has always been a doomed political fantasy and that the Greek debacle, whatever its outcome, is a minor foretaste of the cataclysm to come; those of the Jean-Claude Juncker persuasion who sincerely believe the European ideal is worth every compromise, however fudged or temporary; and those who don’t much care about monetary rigour or European unity but would rather see any sort of settlement than a Greek nation thrown into destitution, chaos and the desperate option of a Russian embrace.