The reputation of Dominic Cummings, former senior adviser to Boris Johnson and self-styled genius, took another turn for the worse this weekend. He seems to have spent his time since quitting Downing Street in November 2020 experimenting with mind altering drugs – and failing.
He now appears to think that Switzerland is in the EU and the Swiss franc has been able to muscle its way undetected into the eurozone.
In an ill-judged tweet on Sunday, he suggested the Credit Suisse crisis was part of a larger problem involving “Eurozone institutions” and that there was “much more Eurozone chaos coming & it’ll turn out massive lies/fraud everywhere as usual” and mysteriously implicating “Remain pundits”.
Cummings’ Eurozone confusion
It’s little wonder he’s critical of EU regulators. Allowing the Swiss franc into the eurozone would indeed be a massive failure on their part, although not that likely. Someone would be bound to notice pretty quickly and write in to complain about it.
His tweet, whch was in response to one from Edward Luce, associate editor at the FT, who wasn’t even talking about Credit Suisse anyway, got plenty of pushback, mostly by way of ridicule.
Galaxy-brained ignorance
There can hardly be any greater demonstration of why the country finds itself in the present mess when the former prime minister’s chief adviser doesn’t seem to know his rectum from his synovial joint.
To be sure, Switzerland is not in the EU or the single market (the EEA) and has its own currency, the Swiss franc (this morning’s forex rate 1 EUR = 0.992 CHF) which is definitely not in the Eurozone.
One tweet pointed to a list of the safest banks in the world published last year by Global Finance magazine and noting that the EU has nine out of the top ten with the other one being in Switzerland. Britain doesn’t have a single bank in the top 50 although Cummings didn’t mention that.
