Order of no merit
WHAT I like about the pecking order at the International Monetary Fund is what Lord Melbourne liked about the Order of the Garter: there is no damned merit about it. By those standards, how enjoyable is the deal with the French which saves Britain's (and France's) place among the top five — carrying guaranteed direc- torships on the Fund's board. At the same time the Fund's (French) managing direc- tor has been baulked in his desire to double the Fund's capital. (Don't need any more capital at all, Nigel Lawson used to grum- ble; they'll only encourge people by lend- ing to them; they can't get it back from the people they've lent to already.) The pay- off, or so everybody assumes, is the setting up of the new European Bank for Recon- struction and Development in London, but under a Frenchman, the eccentric Jacques Attali. (His life of Sir Sigmund Warburg, whom he once met for half an hour, is on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum at S.G. Warburg and refers to a Governor of the Bank of England called Norman Monta- gu.) I was tickled to see my forecast fulfilled by the familiar group of canary- fanciers rushing into print to explain how the new bank must be sited in Canary Wharf. I would have thought if our claim for the bank is based on the City as a financial centre, that is where to put it.
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