Ambrose Pritchard-Evans is a model of honesty

While I have of late thrown a few blunt brickbats the Daily Telegraph’s way, it still emits reality more often than any other UK medium. This is particularly true of its business perspective as defined by the older, wiser heads.

The leader of this troupe is unquestionably Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. Less well-known than the FT’s Martin Wolf, he is less intellectual and therefore more accessible than Mr Wolf. More to the point, I also happen to think his feet are far closer to the ground that is undulating disturbingly beneath our feet.

The reason AEP’s stuff is so outstanding revolves around a unique combo of assiduously assembled data – and an interpretation that spells danger plus social perspective. There is no other mainnstream media business journalist doing this with the same care and clarity.

It is a sad reality of contemporary financial culture that much of the Bourse community would regard his latest piece about the US situation as bordering on socialist in its viewpoint – but nothing could be further from the truth. Ambrose merely tells the empirical data as it is, and thinks about the implications in a way that would elude the deeply odious Lloyd Blankfein.

We now have a ‘recovery’ in the US so demographically narrow, it would be more at home in 1787 France than 2011 global economics. AEP reminds his readers that what is supposed to be the engine room of capitalism has become a captain on steroids, heading at full pelt for the nearest iceberg. Significantly, he tends to get 2-3 times the comments of any other Telegraph business commentator.

Continuing the parallel-year theme, our species is at one of those points where a few random events either way could make the difference between total darkness and another chance. The last time this happened was in the summer of 1941, when it looked to all the world as if fascist militarism would become the planetary norm. By the year’s end, however, the German advance had stalled in Russia, and the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor.

I wonder what the telling event of 2011 will be. The emergence of a US Presidential candidate people can at last believe because he or she tells the truth? EU members going AWOL? The emergence of a Citizens’ Movement in the UK that feels able to embrace the best of social weal and capitalist endeavour? The collapse of a central government in favour of local devolution in some form? A politician prepared to question the commercial consensus?

Maybe there’ll be nothing….or not something we recognise until later. The latter is so often the way. For the Americans in December 1941, it felt like a disaster. But in reality it was the first nail in the totalitarian coffin.

1990, and the end of the Berlin Wall, in turn felt like the last nail being hammered in with enormous satisfaction. But the death of Soviet Communism  led only to greed’s triumphalism. We need to get back to a sense of balance, and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is an unlikely (but leading) light in the vanguard of that process.