JOSÉ SÓCRATES CARVALHO PINTO DE SOUSA, the Portuguese Prime Minister, is obviously riding on a high this week after the “success” of the NATO summit in Lisbon showed that Portugal is capable of throwing a good party for guests who possess nuclear weapons and lend Portugal large amounts of money.
PINTO DE SOUSA, BETTER KNOWN TO HIS SUPPORTERS as “Socrates”, perhaps due to the prestige involved in being associated with one of the most intelligent, liberal, humanist and courageous thinkers of all time, obviously deserves a bit of a break, as he has been doing his best dealing with the collapsing Portuguese economy for the last two years – or, more specifically, he, an engineer by profession, has been struggling with trying to explain what is going wrong to the Portuguese people, most of whom seem to believe that money, when it doesn’t grow on trees or turn up during the night underneath a mattress, comes from Brussels.
IN AN ATTITUDE SOMEWHAT THE REVERSE of Lord Young’s (see Sunday Morning last), but the same as that of the Republic of Ireland, Socrates spends a large part of his increasingly rare public appearances (once it was twice a day on the news, but now there is a tendency to lay low) telling everyone that things are fine. The mere fact that Portugal owes untold billions of Euros to a large group of investors and the debt is increasing daily seems neither here nor there.
(My title states the reported last words of the “real” Socrates, mortified more by owing someone something than by the hemlock creeping up his legs to his heart. When most of our politicians come to an end I imagine they will owe someone much more than a cock.)
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