But Mr Tsipras is certainly not mad, or not in the sense that he has lost his marbles. Despite his Marxist beliefs and trainee demagogue antics, there is something rather compelling about the cunning way in which he has handled this crisis and declined to be railroaded by the corporatist EU powers-that-be, even though he has been slapped in the face (literally, last week) by the atrocious Jean Claude Juncker, the president of the EU commission. This is to say nothing of the ineffective behaviour of the over-rated German chancellor, Angela Merkel, cooed over by diplomats and the foreign policy community despite no one ever being able to name a single great achievement or convincing act of leadership in her career other than the knifing of her mentor Helmut Kohl.