HEMLOCK AND AFTER

JOSÉ SOCRATES PINTO DE SOUSA, the outgoing prime minister of Portugal, is surely not the incompetent, devious, arrogant, lying, corrupt and insecure thief that many people here in Portugal believe he is, but one cannot argue with the statistics that state that his policies have ground entrepreneurial initiative into granite dust and led a third of the population to regularly fill up their petrol tanks over the border in Spain.

SOUSA’S RUNNING THE ECONOMY has its calamitous precedents in the governments that came before him: since the late nineties we have seen mismanagement, dishevelled and often deranged projection of policies by politicians who might have been better used in mental hospitals, hurried announcements of half-baked projects and the widespread use of the “brown envelope”, which, I must state here, was never the case of Mr “Socrates”, the son of humble country, goat-milking folk who now is the owner of two apartments in the most prestigious areas of Lisbon.

“SOCRATES” SEEMS TO HAVE ACCEPTED that he and his bloated government of fat-wallet investment bankers and bespoke-suited cronies are about to go down the toilet. Several of his original horn-rimmed supporters have already bitten the bullet and skived off into the private sector so that they could at least fork out massive loans to their children before the heavy hand of the IMF or the European Commission (in the hands of another Portuguese robber baron) can come along as they are fleeing the country and ask questions such as: “And did you pack this suitcase yourself, sir”. Of course he did. He packed it. “And does it contain any sharp objects or liquids, sir?” “Yes. The Portuguese economy.”