This small man thinks he’s St. Joan

I sympathise with Alistair Darling and his defence of the City. When he’s not contending with Gordon Brown’s suicidal Tobin tax proposals, Darling has to confront Nicolas Sarkozy’s calculated anti-Anglo popular politics.

Yesterday, the Elysees’s Puss-in-Boots delivered a deliberately provocative and economically senseless attack on what he described as the “unconstrained Anglo-Saxon market model.” Sarkozy sees the appointment of Michel Barnier as EU financial regulation supremo as a “victory” for France; he expressed himself in those exact terms:

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Owen Matthews

Zelensky knew who he was dealing with. And he misstepped

“Do you know what it means for me to see for the first time in 50 years a French European commissioner in charge of the internal market, including financial services, including the City [of London]?

“I want the world to see the victory of the European model, which has nothing to do with the excesses of financial capitalism.”