There has been a lot of handwringing around the democratic deficit implicit in a ‘technocratic’ Government running a country with a PM at the helm that has not been elected into place. Setting aside what a technocrat actually is (I think they just like the word because it sounds cold and statist) and also setting aside the democratically sound sequence of events where politicians allowed these people to take over because they, you know, know what they’re doing, I can’t help but think that it is precisely technocrats at the helm that is required to solve the Euro crisis.

Let’s consider what we can expect otherwise with the politicians at the helm:

The David Cameron solution – the big bazooka approach of allowing the European Central Bank to print as many Euros as we need to bail out Italy, Spain, Greece and, heck, why not France too while we’re at it. Yes, yields would go down, yes the stock market would go up, but this is not real money that is being produced here, we’d be fighting debt with debt and I bet that wouldn’t work. It is more than a little bit convenient that this proposed solution effectively firewalls the United Kingdom from the fallout.

The Angela Merkel solution – With German patience with European neighbours wearing wafer thin, the idea of a Berlin bailout is all but dead. The problem child countries in the Eurozone need to feel pain, and need to be seen to be feeling pain, for Chancellor Merkel being seen to have done her job properly. I don’t know what the German word for schadenfreude is, but I bet the Germans are feeling it when they see those yields hit 7%. Insolvency and falling out of the Euro seems to be the general direction here.

The Nicolas Sarkozy solution – A financial transactions tax basically, a Robin Hood tax that takes from London and goes straight through the EU and out the other side to France via the Common Agricultural Policy rebates. Merci beaucoup my British chums, one might say, but there is no chance that Cameron will accept this, let alone his Eurosceptic backbenchers.

The Greek/Italian solution – Get the technocrats banking experts to find the solution that is a mix of the above and politically unpleasant for all.

Banking’s a tough old beast. The issue at hand here is basically the mother of all intercompany reconciliations that needs to be lanced and wound down to zero across a continent (and no doubt beyond). As someone who has had to audit and complete numerous relatively straightforward but nonetheless hideously ghastly intercompany recs in my time, I can be sure that we have a 99.9%/0.01% situation at play here. (that is, despite the millions of column inches, only the 0.01% know what they’re talking about. And you can probably add a few zeroes after that decimal point).

We need troubleshooters who can look beyond the next budget, who can look beyond the elections that are around the corner and can objectively take the difficult decisions while all about them people are losing their heads.

Those people are boring, those people wear brown suits and black shoes, those people can see eight, nine steps ahead, those people gobble Excel spreadsheets for breakfast, those people are honest brokers and cut through the crap.

For want of a better word, those people are technocrats and their time is now.