I’ve been thinking quite a lot today about the term ‘loose ends’. It’s a much used metaphor, but in many ways it can be contradictory – depending on the singular/plural thing.

Loose ends are things that need to be resolved, but being at a loose end means being bored by having nothing to do. And it is beginning to worry me that all around the world, the folks supposed to be busy tying up the loose ends seem to be at a loose end. Thus the loose end attitude might go a long way towards explaining why there are so many loose ends everywhere.

Take Ben Bernanke, soon to bow out in the face of the formidable Ms Yellen. WTF else does he have to think about all day beyond those very big loose ends called the recovering economy that refuses to recover, and the National Debt that refuses to fit under the ceiling? The answer is nothing, and so we shouldn’t be surprised that he’s at a loose end and always looks so bored when he does his reports to the Nation about, oddly enough, the economy and the debt. Here’s a guy who doesn’t have that much to do.

And yet the Debt gets bigger, and the economy smaller.

I mean, we have two elements, right? Debt, and economic growth. Achieve the latter and cut some budgets – bingo: debt goes down, wealth goes up. We’re not talking the challenge of landing Herman van Rompuy on Mars by next weekend here….although personally, I think we should be.

The problem is that the loose ends are untied: but at one and the same time, the loose end is apparent in Ben’s wide-eyed air of tedium. It’s not supposed to be like this.

Mario Draghi gives off the same vibes. His loose ends are insolvent eurobanks and bankrupt ClubMed sovereigns. But the thing with Mario is, whenever he presents to the world’s media on these subjects, he always looks and sounds like a bloke with nowhere near enough to do. Popes give me the same feeling, but then their concerns are less temporal. Draghi on the other hand is the most powerful financier between Wall Street and Beijing, but his general demeanour is that of a man on page 53 of a 380-page detective novel who long ago worked out the ending.

Now this, I confess, worries me. I don’t mind stressed leaders stamping out the fires that are scorching the loose ends while making a good fist of appearing unruffled. But I do draw the line at a banking giant bored by the process of getting to the last page, he alone understanding the futility of the exercise. I’m made anxious by the thought of there being no escape, and the key to this is Mario’s permanent sense of ennuie: it radiates unavoidable doom. He has the unmistakable air of a bandleader on the Titanic.

Above all, I really do get worried when a self-styled leader looks and sounds not like he’s at a loose end, but that he is one of the loose ends. I get this feeling every time I subject myself to a soundbite from David Cameron. A lot of the time he looks bored in the sense he can’t actually believe any of this matters that much: but the words he so insincerely utters place him firmly in the camp of ‘loose end whose only possible resolution is to be crisply snipped’. I have little doubt that this will be his fate at the hands of Conservative loyalists in due course, but I suppose the thing I’d most like to know about Cammers is whether he has any idea at all as to what the loose ends are in the first place.

My measured conclusion is that our Prime Minister hasn’t the foggiest. He is a left-over loose end from the age of vacant Blairism, but the complexity of contemporary British loose ends is, I suspect, well beyond him. These include the class system, the education system, the welfare system, the health system, the childcare system, the banking system, and the political system.

Dave could be trained to say, “Let’s be clear about this, the problem is systemic”. But nobody on his side of the House wants him to say that….least of all him. Mr Cameron is a loose end who will be tossed in the bin, and very probably replaced by a loose cannon with a screw loose. My fervent hope is that at this point, several million citizens at a loose end (but with a better end in mind) just might tie up all the loose ends.

Sadly, my ever-present fear is that the Mob will string up the loose ends – pleading as ever that the ends justify the means.