Shortly after the death of John Paul II in 2005, the wise and amiable Father Dominic Milroy, former prior of the Benedictine college in Rome, leant across a dinner table and said, ‘Martin, you’d make a good candidate for Pope.’ ‘But father,’ I protested, ‘I’m not even a Catholic.’ ‘Oh don’t worry,’ he responded, ‘We can soon see about that.’ Likewise I’m glad to discover that not holding a US passport does not rule me out as a candidate to succeed Paul Wolfowitz as president of the World Bank when he departs next month, so long as I’m prepared to convert: his predecessor, Australian-born James Wolfensohn, took American citizenship in order to secure nomination by Bill Clinton in 1995. That helpful precedent opens the way not only for me but also for the runner tipped by former World Bank economist Joseph Stiglitz: Tony Blair, whose decade-long spiritual journey will surely be all the more complete if he now becomes an American as well as a Catholic.
More conventional candidates, at this stage, include Robert Zoellick, the former US trade representative and deputy secretary of state, now at Goldman Sachs; Stanley Fischer, a former IMF chief who is now governor of the Bank of Israel; plus a clutch of US academics and senators. Ethnically alternative suggestions include former Nigerian finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (who would be the first woman in the post) and Ashraf Ghani of Kabul University. The joy of this process, however, is that mischief-makers can throw in all sorts of unlikely names — such as John Bolton, the grim neocon hardliner who failed to secure Senate confirmation as UN ambassador, and Bono, the anti-poverty rock star with the sunglasses — purely to watch them echo around the blogosphere. If The Spectator were to tip, say, Jeremy Clarkson, I’ll bet you that within 24 hours a dozen internet obsessives (most of them World Bank staffers with worryingly little else to do) would post detailed assessments of his qualifications for the job.
Come to think of it, Clarkson’s just the sort of cut-the-crap action-man the Bank needs at this juncture — so go to it, bloggers.
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