CITY AND SUBURBAN
At the Berlin financial Olympics as Nigel goes for gold
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
Berlin herehere seems to be some mistake here. I am attending the financial Olympics. Some games are still going on in Seoul, where the International Monetary Fund and World Bank met three years ago, but the big events are now in Berlin. British hopes rest on Nigel Lawson in the tightrope-walking and the figure-skating on thin ice. These are likely to be his last games and he is going for gold. He will need some. The games operate on the principle of the caucus race in Alice in Wonderland, where it was deemed that everybody had won and all should have prizes. With some ten thousand contestants, this can be diffi- cult, but there are plenty of events, and the television audience at home is the one that counts. The Governor of the Bank of Zaire, Wa Syassighe Pay Pay, can still hope for a bronze for attacking hunger over the Development Committee dinner.
The Americans, who normally dominate the games, are fielding a new team this year, with the veteran Jim Baker staying at home, coaching. Little has been seen of his successor Nick Brady, faintly praised by Lawson as seeming to be a nice chap. Everyone knows that if Baker's coaching efforts fail, in November, Brady will not be picked again. The Japanese are seizing this opportunity to put themselves onto the scoreboard, where they think they belong, and the French, expert at financial games- manship and happy to see the Americans trip over, are running with the Japanese.
All the main events are being hotly contested, with records shattered in such sports as arm-twisting, log-rolling, ear- biting, freeloading, glad-handling, gate- crashing and elbowing. The host country has introduced such new events as wall- Jumping, demonstrating, and synchronised sprinting with nightsticks and riot shields. In these, the home athletes are favoured since Berlin has an exceptionally large student population who, having originally arrived and enrolled as the alternative to undergoing conscription, have stayed on and on, and put in so much practice as to be in all but name professionals. It is said that Berlin has the oldest teenagers in the world, after Cliff Richard.
Only in the events which they contest have unauthorised substances been a fac- tor, and the organisers have not enforced tests. Authorised substances, from sauer- kraut to sushi, have been available in profusion, but the marathon-runners and obstacle-racers whose course takes them through nine banks' parties a night deem them to be a necessary hazard – part of the sport – rather than an enhancer of per- formance. No one has been sent home.
In the party-going event, British medal winners have included the Midland Bank for booking the Egyptian Museum, and letting their guests enjoy the bust of Nefertiti with their canapes. The Euro- money team under Sir Patrick Sergeant won its habitual medal for being the only reliable source of good champagne.
This year it was the source of a medal, too. Nigel Lawson was its choice as finance minister of the year – the first time that this award has gone to a British minister. Accepting it, Lawson said that he was now the longest-serving Treasury minister since Gladstone. Presenting it, Sir Patrick said that he was the best since Gladstone. All admired the finance minister, but some inquired about the year. I explained that to give Kingsley Amis his long-deserved Booker Prize did not mean that The Old Devils was his best novel.
Lawson has been in pentathlon-winning form. His most difficult event, the long jump over the trade gap, he carried off without incident – the spectators having been allowed to suppose that the gap would be wider than it turned out to be. In the sabre, he landed three or four slashing blows on Michel Camdessus, head of the IMF. Some thought that, in these games, Camdessus was the referee, but that did not stop Lawson. He went for Camdessus as a lax lender and an old-fashioned Keynesian (that is, someone who wonders whether Lawson was right to cut taxes) and he publicly doubted whether the IMF, which wants to double its capital, needed any more money. If Camdessus really is a referee, we may have trouble in future events when Lawson is competing, but that is a worry for another day.
Another Lawson medal came as the reward for long preparation. The judges rated his the best plan for relieving govern- ment debt to the poorest countries of Africa south of the Sahara. There may be 34 of them (there is dispute over whether Nigeria, the biggest debtor, is far enough south of the Sahara to count) and they owe $62 billion, which for most of them means only that they continue to be debited the interest. Some cannot even service their IMF loans, and under its rules are there- fore cut off from its help. Lawson and others are suggesting ways of bending these rules, for the first need in dealing with these countries is to face the facts. For achieving that he deserves his medal. Stoltenberg of Germany, who opposed him, stood aside like a good host and let him win. Trichet of France lodged an objection, saying that it was his plan all the time, but the judges overruled him, for boring.
The last event in the pentathlon was cruelly staged in a vast indoor stadium, sparsely populated by gossiping officials. This required Lawson to carry a heavy argument for half an hour, in a most uncomfortable position — out of balance, but explaining as he went how he was able to hold himself up by levitation.
Nowadays, he says, you cannot expect athletes to keep their balance. Four of the original Group of Five performers, himself now included, are seriously out of balance in one direction or another. What matters is whether the audience believes they are going to fall over. Once the audience believes that, they will fall over. Until then the levitation can continue.
`Credit worthiness' is his name for this discipline. Ten or 20 years ago British athletes were very bad at this. Consequent- ly they kept falling over and having to be rescued or even carried off the field. That lesson has now been learned, he says, and he himself has all the credit worthiness that anyone could want, and the medals to show for it.
This was a determined performance by Lawson, and though some judges marked him down for a circular argument, it may have been good enough. If indeed it is true that he now plans to hang up his medals and, like his old sparring-partner Jim Baker, take up training, the next games will miss his flair and style, and be duller without him.
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