When my co-author Richard North and I were compiling our history of how all this had unfolded, The Great Deception, we concluded that the “project” was eventually bound to unravel, simply because it was built on too much deception and self-deception. The most obvious place for disintegration to begin was the single currency. As shrewd observers recognised right from the start, this could never last, because of the essential contradiction between the low interest rates demanded by its stronger economies and the temptation this would give their weaker brethren, such as Greece, Ireland and Spain, to go on a reckless spending spree.