Shoichi Nakagawa needed a drink to get through it

From The Times

Nobody likes a censure motion and when he wakes up this morning Shoichi Nakagawa's world is going to look comprehensively – some would say deservedly – awful.

Was it booze or cough medicine that caused the Finance Minister's astonishing drawly buffoonery in Rome? We may never find out but what we do know is that, whichever bottle he did hit between lunch and that fateful Saturday press conference, Mr Nakagawa's world was pretty awful beforehand.

Place yourself, for a slurred second, in his shoes as he boarded that plane from Tokyo to Rome on Friday. Disappearing behind him was the country whose finances he was charged with running – a country spiralling into its steepest economic nosedive and the worst quarterly decline in Japanese GDP for 35 years. Neither he, nor seemingly anyone around him, has any bright ideas about which buttons to press to even restart the engines, let alone navigate to safety.

And he will have known just how much public scorn and disappointment he was flying away from: Mr Nakagawa is the wing man of a Prime Minister who is rapidly emerging as the most unpopular in history. Tens of thousands of Japanese are losing their jobs and blaming, among others, Mr Nakagawa's Finance Ministry.

And looking ahead to landing in Rome, Japan's Finance Minister will surely have groaned at the looming ordeal: a litany of predictable handwringing by a parade of flint-faced financial leaders at a grim beano nobody wanted to attend. The world is in abject crisis and he must have known there was little he or Japan could do to beam light into the depression. The gathering of international supremos will have reminded him that he is not, by any means, the sort of international financial statesman required of an economic powerhouse like Japan.

Of course, he should never have been allowed to appear in that state in public, and the incident smacks of stupendous lack of judgment at best and contempt at worst. Whatever Mr Nakagawa's poison was – merlot, malt whisky or medicine – a good many of us may sympathise with the idea that some liquid may have been required to see him through the weekend from hell.