Consensus is a fine thing but, come election time, the manners of the grandest of coalitions may not be, well, grand. So it was on Friday when Peer Steinbrück, Germany’s finance minister, rounded on Nokia, the Finnish mobile phone-maker, for closing a plant in Germany and relocating production to Romania, accusing it of “caravan capitalism”.

It is a paradox that Germany, arguably the biggest winner in the globalisation stakes among rich countries, is also one of the richest sources of petulant epithets against the source of its riches.