“Looking at Britain today we are inevitably drawn to thinking of another time and country – Germany’s Weimar Republic of the 1920s and early 1930s,” mused Spectator editor Michael Gove in his weekly newsletter to subscribers today.
“Of course, no contemporary figure is comparable to ‘the Austrian corporal’,” he adds, giving a cheeky sobriquet to one of history’s greatest mass murderers. “But our politics is increasingly moving from the corridors of powers to the streets, our political leaders are turning over at an alarming rate, and economic insecurity has left our currency desperately close to Reichsmark territory.”
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Hyperbole much? While it’s certainly true that inflation, at 3.8%, is not insubstantially above the Bank of England’s stated 2% target, it’s not desperately close to Reichsmark territory – by November 1923, for example, one US dollar equalled 4.2 trillion marks and, as any good GCSE history student will tell you, workers were being paid three times a day by the barrelload of notes.
Ahead of pretty much every reshuffle during Gove’s cabinet career his media outriders would talk of him taking over the Treasury. Given his grasp of economic history, perhaps it’s best he never reached No 11!
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