Turn-up for the book
THE Grand International Boondoggle Handicap was a rough race in which the favourite was nobbled, prompting the sta- ble to insist that its second string should be declared the winner. The prize is to be managing director of the International Monetary Fund (so what can the second prize be? The World Bank?) and Horst Kohler got there by being German. He may be better, all the same, than the form- book suggests. In Paris the other day he startled a salon of bankers by telling them that he wanted to work with them. The 1MF's critics were right, so he said. It needed to change and to concentrate, to stop trying to do the World Bank's work for it, to accept that there were limits on its power to throw money about and to impose its solutions like a colonial power — in short, to remember that it was a mon- etary institution. I look forward to hearing him say that, like other monetary institu- tions, it should learn to manage with small- er offices and fewer people. The bankers have had to learn this already. One of them quoted Lloyd George on Bonar Law, the Conservatives' compromise choice as their leader: 'The damned fools have chosen the right man by accident.'
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