Matthew Dancona

This financial Waterloo

‘It’s like the battle of Waterloo,’ one leading Cameroon said to me at the Spectator’s party last night. He meant that nobody knew what the morning would bring, and that once the battle had been joined – in this case a global financial battle between impersonal forces of unimaginable scale – nothing would be the same again.

He was right. One has the sense here at the Tory Party conference in Birmingham of being in an ant colony whose residents have just realised how tiny they really are. This is not a reflection upon the Conservatives, who had a good day yesterday and are running a show as smooth as an Innocent smoothie here. No: the problem is that it is hard to compel media and public interest in the prospective policies of an incoming Tory Government when the Dow is in freefall and the very future of the British banking system is in doubt.

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