The BBC this morning has the Met Office issuing ‘Severe weather warnings of heavy rain, and flood alerts across parts of England, following a weekend that saw flood rescues in Wales’. If you’ve never tried to rescue a Welsh flood, I don’t recommend it: tricky cove at the best of times, yer flood, but truculent Welsh floods, well….don’t get me started. Still, Met Office on the ball as usual, issuing a warning of heavy rain. I don’t know about you, but we had ours Saturday and Sunday. Oh, and the markets have welcomed the Spanish Bank deal. I suppose if the alternative was every third baby being sold into slavery, one would even welcome the entry of Lord Mandelson. There was no smutty pun intended there, it just sort of happened. Sorry.

Italy, by contrast, faces more scrutiny following Spain’s bank bailout. Italy has over €2trillion of debt, more as a share of GDP than any advanced economy after Greece and Japan. The vaguely disturbing thing about Italy in that context is that it is the guarantor for 22% of Spain’s bailout funds. Bloomberg says that Italy is now in the crisis crosshairs. Let’s hope it’s not in the calamitous collapse of catastrophic crisis crosshairs, as that can really hurt. Especially if you get your fingers caught. Game of dominoes anyone?

In keeping with his avowed commitment to liberal democracy, President Rasputin of Russia’s men have been visiting the leaders of a forthcoming anti-Putin demonstration, and offering them a free ransack. David Cameron, it seems, left his eight year-old son alone in a pub. It can’t have been a very good pub if there was only the Cameronet there. We should all bear in mind re this story that Cameron also once left his son in the charge of Rebekah Brooks for three hours on a Cornish beach. So the bloke has form when it comes to serious child neglect.

The low price airline Flybe is progressing, the problem being the direction of travel. It lost £4.3m in f2011, and £6.2m in f2012. All the airlines will, I confidently predict, be in trouble by the end of the summer. I can be very confident in that prediction, because the banks likely to foreclose on them are about to lose all the money the airline passengers gave them…if they haven’t already done so. Like Credit Agricole, allegedly.

China enjoyed sluggish growth in May for the second month in a row, says Reuters. I doubt very much if Beijing enjoyed it as such, but at any rate somehow it managed to be sluggish but put in a strong export performance. This means it was both a bad result for the EU, which badly needs some Chinese money, and bad news for the Americans, who import a lot of Chinese stuff, and badly need to get their deficit down. I bet those evil Chinese fixed it that way round on purpose, the bastards. If China’s growth can be termed sluggish, that must make Britain a valium-addled catatonic snail, but following George Osborne’s weekend alibi (“A big fat boy with a Greek accent stole my homework and then ran away”) the Tory rank and file have given him a yellow-to-orange card and told him to focus on ‘growth at home’ as the FT puts it. Me, I’d settle for growth in exports to Azhebaijhan if I though we could make a turn on it.

Either way, the Draper’s Conservative critics want the coalition to cut business taxes more aggressively, and ‘sweep away employment regulation’. This may be a crafty way to make bussed-in Jubilee slaves legal in a post hoc manner, so watch out.  Meanwhile, being myself a former businessman with half a brain left (as opposed to a Leftie of no brain) I don’t think we need any sweeping away, but rather, some more sweeping in of tax from the hundreds of large multinational companies who pay on average 12% as much as the rest of us, and nihilistic ‘ankers who often pay none at all. (Enter three hooded witches Stage Right screeching “They’ll leeeeave, you just wait and see”. “Hurrah!” shouts the audience).

And finally, The Wall Street Journal insists that ‘Ms. Merkel has worked valiantly to give Europe a “Thatcher moment”‘. Just this once I’ll give you a link to the complete piece, as although that will give its proprietor hits he wouldn’t dream of giving to anyone else, it does kind of give away bigtime what is wrong with the US free-market view of life on Earth. It’s well written, and there are some gems in it (‘Mr. Monti sometimes acts as if he believes simply not being Silvio Berlusconi automatically gives him the moral authority to demand Germany underwrite Italy’s debts’) but most of it is simply Manhatten 24/7 security penthouse bollocks. I can’t argue with the judgement that the Fuhrerin has given us plenty of Thatcher moments (at times she can make the Baroness seem like Mother Theresa) but these little episodes are rather more Poll Tax than Falklands War.