San Paulo

Tony Blair did not know, and possibly still does not know, that they spoke Portuguese in Brazil. But even he would not have uttered quite the howler that provides the title to this post. In George Osborne, we have a Chancellor of the Exchequer, or even a human being, who is - now, brace yourselves for this - even more ignorant than Tony Blair.

Speaking of Portuguese matters, just as we could hardly have failed to bail out a country which forms a single economic and cultural unit with this one, and more of whose citizens have always lived over here than over there, so, even if not without conditions, why not go to the aid of any ally so old that they use GMT and BST, eat Cadburys chocolate, and let us use the Azores during the Falklands War? When has anything like the last of those ever been done for us by the countries favoured, even and routinely above Britain, by the objectors, namely America and Israel?

The euro, and with it the entire Eurofederalist project, was always going to be finished as soon as the Germans refused to pay for, say, the Portuguese, or the Italians, or the Irish, or the Greeks, or the Spaniards. Not that I like the term PIIGS. But let them adopt the arrangement that one of them had into the 1980s, of issuing their own currencies, but with the values of those currencies fixed permanently at whatever that of sterling happened to be at the given time; the younger people are in the Irish Republic, the more that they support this move, whereas the singers of sentimental songs are growing older and older.

An option for plenty of other countries, too. Indeed, for as many as wanted to adopt it. Costing us nothing, as the former Irish arrangement cost us nothing. The euro has failed, vindicating those, such as Gordon Brown and Ed Balls but not Ken Clarke and David Cameron, who insisted on staying out. Deal with it. Adopting the dollar means subservience. Deal with that, too.

The Irish Republic no longer has any territorial dispute with the United Kingdom. Portugal has never had any. But Spain still has one, about which she could bang on to her heart's content in the run-up to elections, since this state of affairs would empty any such words of the slightest practical meaning. Likewise, the Greeks and the Elgin Marbles? Why not? But then there is the spiteful continued ban on the Queen's visiting Greece on account of the House into which she has married. After all, Her Majesty will be going to the Irish Republic later this year.

And after the return of the Sterling Area, beginning with countries none of which was ever in the British Empire (what is now the Irish Republic was in the United Kingdom, something quite different and the key to understanding the true history of the Irish in the British imperial period), how about the return of the Commonwealth Preference Area, again including, as the Commonwealth itself now does, countries whose accession constitutes, entirely voluntarily, their first ever tie to Britain?

But all of this requires a Chancellor a great deal more intelligent and better-informed that George Osborne, and a Prime Minister a great deal more intelligent and better-informed than to have appointed him. Not that such people would be too difficult to find.