There’s one major lesson Labour should learn from Syriza’s anniversary

If a week is a long time in politics what’s a year? A century? A millennium? An Ice Age? If you’re Greek it can sometimes feel like all three. One year ago today, on 26 January 2015, Greece’s Syriza party formed the most left-wing government in the country’s history having (ludicrously) promised the Greek people to take on the European establishment and rid them of the austerity measures that had blighted their lives for close to a decade.

If hubris and bombast characterised Syriza’s election campaign, then naivety and disaster characterised its first months in office. The new Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras had given the job of re-negotiating with Greece’s numerous European creditors to his charismatic but abrasive finance minister, Yannis Varoufakis. Varoufakis, an undoubtedly brilliant academic who specialises in Game Theory, seemed to believe that the relationship between Greece and the EU was just one big game of chicken. One only had to hold one’s nerve and all would be well.