PORTUGAL. THE MAN

PORTUGAL HAS OFT BEEN mentioned of late under the same breath as Greece in the sense that it is doomed to failure in the short and long term due to the fact over the last twenty years it has been receiving money from kindly, good-hearted Germans who thought that their goodness would be repaid by Portuguese leaders applying it in the best interests of the Portuguese people.

ALAS! THE GERMANS MUST NOW CRY, having discovered that all of this money has been frittered away on beach houses, megalomaniac projects such as the Portuguese World Exhibition of 1998, the 2004 European Soccer Nations’ Cup Finals, bridges which take no one anywhere, motorways which stop short of their destinations and have turned into pot-holed death-traps in a matter of months, and on good old-fashioned pocket-lining for the élite of the Socialist and Social Democrat parties who have taken turns in sharing out the loot among themselves and their friends in the civil engineering companies responsible for building the crumbling, mould-infested heritage of rubble that is modern Portugal.

MORE RECENTLY, OF COURSE, as the bottom has fallen out of the easy money market, those busybodies at the IMF, European Union and European Central Bank have reined in the cash and called upon the Portuguese government to tighten up controls.

THE NEW LEADER OF PORTUGAL, Mr Passos Coelho, is slightly different to the stereotype Prime Minister of recent years in that, rather than looking like an insurance salesman, sales representative for Marks and Spencer, fish, priest or minor character in a Quentin Tarantino film (to list the last five Portuguese PMs), he could easily be an understudy for Roger Moore in a James Bond movie of the 1980s. In those bits of the movie where Roger Moore got punched, kicked, soaked in water or slapped about a bit by a Russian female, Passos Coelho would step in and do the job to perfection.

ANOTHER ASPECT IN WHICH he has differed from his predecessors of the last twelve years or so is that rather than doing nothing and allowing the Portuguese economy to go down the toilet, his approach, as announced yesterday, is to do something to make the economy go even further down the toilet, with his bog-brush style economic and financial measures for 2012 guaranteed to make whatever was left of a country clinging on to hope to feel the flush of the chain and be swept into the sewers.

PORTUGAL. THE MAN, the pop group of my title, is a psychedelic trash metal group originally from Wasilla, Alaska, but who have come closer to reality by moving to Portland, Oregon. Somewhat like the Portuguese politicians of the last twenty or so years (in my experience), they know very little about the reality of Portugal.