CITY AND SUBURBAN
It's a bird, it's a plane, it's Clarke Kenneth the jet-setting Superchancellor takes flight
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
Back from the circus at Naples, Ken- neth Clarke will be looking forward to his holiday. I recommend Nottinghamshire. It is at its modest best at this time of the year, it is his home ground and he has not been seeing much of it lately. His office, too, must seem unfamiliar, for although his work is piling up, his timetable keeps taking him abroad, and it is scarcely worth Mrs Clarke's while to unpack his suitcase and sort out his socks. So far this year, by my reckoning, this has happened 17 times. Jan- uary found the Chancellor in the far east, on a trade mission. He got back in time to go off to an Ecofin (acronym for the monthly meeting of European finance min- isters) and to wind up as a speaker at the World Economic Forum at Davos. Febru- ary took him to Frankfurt (Group of Seven finance ministers, or G7, to talk about Rus- sia) and March to Detroit, for President Clinton's summit meeting on unemploy- ment. April's Ecofin was an informal meet- ing in an hotel outside Athens. It jostled for space in his diary with Warsaw (a quick word) and St Petersburg (many slow words, at the annual meeting of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Develop- ment) and Washington (another 07, and the interim conunitee of the International Monetary Fund.) May was oddly quiet — just an Ecoftn — but June took him to Paris (annual meeting of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Develop- ment) and Corfu (the European Council.) Then he could look forward to Naples and the 07 again, with the communiqué cooked in advance and any controversial subjects, such as the dollar, left out. At such moments he must pinch himself. At the other end of Europe he has left behind a ministry and an economy, each with a well- established knack for going wrong. Can he possibly be in the right place? Are his jour- neys really necessary?
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