Worth two in the bush
THE Treasury is justly proud of having coaxed the Berd to nest on our shores the first time that a major international agency has come here. Even so, Parisians living next to Unesco or Romans down the road from the Food and Agriculture Orga- nisation know that a fattifer agency models its nesting habits on those of the cuckoo. It moves into a palatial building and fills it with staff who (since they work for an international organisation) pay no tax and ignore their parking tickets. The jealousy this induces is heightened when they swamp the good local restaurants and clear the market for secretaries. They endear themselves to the locals only as a source of duty-free Scotch. The danger with the Berd is that it too will occupy some ivory tower, filled with directors of policy de- velopments and advisers on strategic issues all authorising each others' air tickets, with M. Attali in his ivory attic having second thoughts about time. That will be less of a danger if the Berd is perched amid the international financial markets of the City and forms part of them — and is within range, too, of the Bank of England and the Treasury. The Chancellor expects that the site will be either in the City or in Docklands. He should reflect that a Berd in hand is worth two way out in the bush. That should be part of his plan for com- manding, within the Berd, the influence which Britain so ineptly fails to capture in most other agencies. There is no Brit in the IMF above the rank of deputy treasurer, and in the World Bank (as distinct from its offshoots) none in the top 30 slots. In these agencies, patronage filters downwards. Turks prefer Turks, Pakistanis recruit other Pakistanis. Mr Major can bet his boots that the Hungarians already have more Hungarians all lined up. The Treas- ury and the Bank should be preparing their own line-up of professionals to be para- chuted in on secondment. Later, it will be too late to scratch around and come up with a few superannuated merchant bank- ers or Under-Secretaries passed over for promotion. A thinnifer Berd could be Britain's distinctive contribution to the new and reclaimed Europe. A fattifer would just be a greedy and alien cuckoo.
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