13:15

Meanwhile in Athens it has not gone unnoticed that Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has chosen to remain silent about Greece’s much-awaited bailout exit, writes Helena Smith from Athens. His only public utterance today has been to tweet his congratulations to the county’s youth water polo team on its world championship victory.

Has this got something to do, perhaps, with the fact that his leftist-led government has signed up to a staggering array of ambitious targets? Post–bailout Greece has committed to produce primary surpluses of 3.5 % of GDP until 2022 – a feat achieved by only a handful of countries since the seventies - and 2.2 % until 2060.

For professor Kevin Featherstone who has followed the twists and turns of the crisis as head of the Hellenic Observatory at the London School of Economics, such obligations amount to perpetual purgatory.

“No other government in Europe would choose to follow this path. It is Ordoliberalism gone wild,” he told the Guardian.

With the fiscal straightjacket remaining so tight, there will be little scope for future administrations to improve economic competitiveness through investment, or accelerate social support for those pauperised by austerity.

“Rehabilitation falls well short,” Professor Featherstone said. “The prospect of a recurrence of the debt crisis has been eliminated but nothing has been done to help Greek society overcome the trauma of excessively high unemployment and bankruptcies.”

Tsipras had hoped to mark the exit with a visit to Kastelorizo, the remote Aegean isle where the drama began. Celebrating Greece’s ‘liberation’ in the place where former Prime Minister George Papandreou had in April 2010 first announced that Athens would seek help from the EU and IMF – after surging Greek bond yields made borrowing on capital markets prohibitive - seemed appropriate to coming full-circle.

But the outcry over his government’s handling of last month’s wildfires – a calamity that has left 94 dead and brought devastation and ruination to hundreds more – put paid to the idea. Fanfare, aides say, will be kept to a minimum.