Beware Greeks begging gifts. Papandreou’s expressed willingness to borrow from the IMF has the Eurocrats rattled.

This Greek business is getting increasingly difficult to follow. To be precise, the Eurozone rules are getting more difficult to follow – and so Greece isn’t any more. Tonight the Greek Cabinet up and announced it will call on the IMF’s resources if its EU chums leave it in the lurch.

That simply won’t wash: either there is a joint currency or there isn’t. One can’t have aspirations to be a member of a federal State, and then say you’ll prop up your own budget deficit as if the ECB didn’t exist. Virginia may be keen on State’s rights, but it ain’t about to run off to the IMF for loans, any more than California might.

What we’re seeing here is the further unfolding of an inevitable future. A future from which we will look back and laugh at the naivety of these EU puppets all declaring that the Euro must survive…but so must we here in our little backwater. Having written four years ago that the member States would soon revert to type once the poo hit the fan, even I didn’t expect the old enmities to come out quite so quickly and forcefully as they have.

Here in Slogger’s Roost, we understand that Jean-Claude of the ECB is livid, and Frau Merkel isn’t best pleased either. But whereas pragmatic central bankers know that politicians will inevitably insist on minimising the electorate’s pain, as a Fuhrerine in the making, Geli Merkel isn’t having any of it. The Lutheran tradition demands the agony of fiscal constipation, and won’t accept any form of delusional anaelgesic.

It is all going to end in tears.