Keeping Greece in an unhappy club

IN the end, everything ran out: time, money, patience, luck, generosity - and the Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis' early departure from the week's fourth Eurogroup meeting, hotfooting it back to the Athens cauldron, gave the other Europeans the cue to say that Greece had unilaterally broken off negotiations and was ejecting itself beyond the European Central Bank's emergency lending assistance. Recriminations all round.

The invective has been stronger than usual. It's rare to have both sides accusing each other of "blackmail". But, after all, this is a close-knit though unhappy family. They owe each other hundreds of billions of euros. It confirms a recurring pattern with currency upsets. Whether with Britain leaving the gold standard in 1931, the Americans abandoning Bretton Woods in 1971, the French quitting the European "snake" in 1974 and 1976, or the UK tumbling out of the exchange rate mechanism in 1992, the people to blame are always the same: foreigners.

It's not too late to return to the negotiating table. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President François Hollande and IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde, three people with much to lose from the debacle, may weaken their respective negotiating positions, and make the Greek government look statesmanlike, by holding out blandishments ahead of Sunday's referendum. No doubt substantial debt relief - promised to the Greeks more than two years ago - will find itself back in the bargaining. But that is unlikely to lead to any great clarification.