Tumbling around

He suggested that Greece’s creditors had a strategy to keep his government busy and hopeful of a compromise, but in reality they were slowly suffering and eventually desperate. «They would say we need all your data on the fiscal path on which Greek finds itself, all the data on state-owned enterprises. So we spent a lot of time trying to provide them with it and answering questionnaires and having countless meetings.» «So that would be the first phase. The second phase was they’d ask us what we intended to do on VAT. They would then reject our proposal but wouldn’t come up with a proposal of their own. And then, before we would get a chance to agree on VAT, they would shift to another issue, like privatisation. They would ask what we want to do about privatisation: we put something forward, they would reject it. Then they’d move onto another topic, like pensions, from there to product markets, from there to labour relations. … It was like a cat chasing its own tail.» His conclusion was succinct. «We were set up.»

«It’s not that it didn’t go down well – there was point blank refusal to engage in economic arguments. Point blank. You put forward an argument that you’ve really worked on, to make sure it’s logically coherent, and you’re just faced with blank stares. It is as if you haven’t spoken. What you say is independent of what they say. You might as well have sung the Swedish national anthem – you’d have got the same reply.» This weekend divisions surfaced within the Eurogroup, with countries split between those who seemed to want a «Grexit» and those demanding a deal. But Varoufakis said they were always been united in one respect: their refusal to renegotiate.