it was slowly dawning on politicians and economists that the crisis, which had
commenced with a mainly US based sub-prime problem, was much, much,
deeper, than had been at first thought. There would be no easy solution. Francis
feared there were few if any courageous and foresighted leaders at hand, as the
dark clouds gathered on the horizon, and he feared not only the West would suffer
I
when the storm broke.
Was it a portent of things to come when, a car carrying Prince Charles and the
Duchess of Cornwall was attacked in the centre of London? The royal car had been
caught in a student demonstration that had turned violent. Luckily for the heir to
Britain’s throne the damage was minimal: a cracked window and a pot of paint on
the car’s costly body work, the royal couple getting off with the scare of their lives.
It was not a rerun of the French Revolution, but a warning, when angry students
clashed with the police after a Parliamentary vote to raise university tuition fees to
as much as nine thousand pounds a year.
The Home Secretary said: ‘What we are seeing in London tonight, the wanton
vandalism, smashing of windows, has nothing to do with peaceful protest.’
Pompous politicians naturally wanted Britons to take the brunt of their persistently
bad decisions lying down.
Sergei Tarasov did not feel unduly worried as the US and the Eurozone were
rocked by their respective internal crises. Russia had recovered from the
destabilising collapse of oil in 2008, after its dangerous military foray into Georgia,
formally part of the USSR. It was again pumping oil and natural gas, and at a never
before seen rate, rivalling Saudi Arabia as the world’s leading exporter of energy.
Its foreign currency reserves were once again looking impressive when Vladimir
Vladimirovich Putin, now Tarasov’s close friend, announced to his inner circle he
would run for the Russian presidency in 2012 election. It was of course no surprise
― no one, but no one, could have imagined it being otherwise.
Putin publicly boasted of his fitness, ready to display his muscles, or his skills in
martial arts, projecting the image of a man of action, if not Actionman, sometimes
astride a Harley-Davidson, others scuba-diving in the Red Sea, and even saving a
TV crew from a Siberian tiger.
There was little or no chance the large majority held in the Duma by his United
Russia Party would be changed by the coming elections. Unlike Western leaders,
Putin was assured of an enviable landslide victory, and not-withstanding the
negative opinion of those same leaders, the German speaking former KGB agent
was a highly popular figure at home.
After his surprise nomination as prime minister by Boris Yeltsin, Putin had gone
on to restore Russia’s national pride and rebuild its economy. After the tragiccomic interlude under Yeltsin, the first president post-Soviet leader, Putin was
perceived by most Russians as the saviour of the nation. His arrival as head of the
Kremlin was a new departure following the uncertain years that followed the
implosion of Communism, which, knowingly or unknowingly, had been
engineered by Mikhail Gorbachev, and the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
Fitzwilliams warmly congratulated Tarasov on his intuition, though it took little
effort for him to realize there had never been any other alternative. Dimitry
Medvedev and Vladimir Putin were a tandem with the latter in firm control. As for
President Medvedev, a former corporate lawyer, the chances were he would step
back into his former role, that of prime minister, faithfully executing his mentor’s
orders.
Had Fitzwilliams had invited himself to the devil’s table? Perhaps, but it was no
Faustian tryst. Thanks to the City he held the devil by the tail, and in his mind
that’s the way it would remain as long as London was the epicentre of the
international financial world.