IMF blog: Our man in Washington

April 12, 2007

You may know the scene from old, flickering newsreel footage shot any time from the mid-Forties to the early Sixties.

Under the Queen's watchful gaze, the Union Jack runs down the flagpole. Another flag is run up. An independent nation is born. The British go home.

All this, of course, was long before our current Prime Minister decided that running the flag up again in assorted inhospitable places was a good idea, but that is another story.

More to the point, this week sees our (presumed) next Prime Minister clear the way for an old-fashioned withdrawal from a piece of territory the British have occupied since 1999.

I refer, of course, to the chairmanship of the ministerial committee of the International Monetary Fund, whose Spring meeting is under way in Washington. The Chancellor could probably go on indefinitely, but not if he lacks the one qualification for the job - being a finance minister.

Funnily enough, as Washington prepared for the last hurrah of the Brown years, I was stricken with a bad case of dental trouble. It was a scene out of Graham Greene - insignificant British man on the edge of great events preoccupied with his own problems.

But the premises in which I was treated had little in common with the seediness of Greeneland. Surrounded by gleaming equipment, I was placed in the hands of a dentist who looked about 17, his eyes shining with the idealism of youth.

After treatment, I was presented with a bill the numbers of which would have been comprehensible only to astrophysicists. For the same money in Blighty, you could have had open-heart surgery with enough left over to celebrate at the Cafe Royal.

Still, the labourer is worthy of his hire, although the episode put a brighter gloss on the Chancellor's NHS spending binge.

True, it has not produced much in the way of NHS dentists, but it is the thought that counts.

Meanwhile, Britain's days in the IMF ministers' chair seem numbered. Could Brown's successor seamlessly take over, turning the position into a sort of Head of the Commonwealth role that is assumed to go to a Brit?

Perhaps. But don't bet on it.

- Dan Atkinson in Washington, Economics Editor, Financial Mail on Sunday

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