The cost of reality

History is littered with all manner of what-ifs, which remain unanswered and are only discussed by historians and armchair pundits.

I was thinking the other day how different things would have turned out for Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and Greece if he had been wiser in his selection of coalition partners and government officials from the outset.

How different, for example, would things have been with a SYRIZA-To Potami coalition, instead of what turned out to be an alliance with Panos Kammenos's Independent Greeks party? What made Tsipras rule out that possibility in January 2015?

Stavros Theodorakis, the leader of the centrist party, was prepared to join a SYRIZA alliance - and he later paid a heavy price for it as it confused party supporters. Tsipras and his aides have said that Theodorakis and his deputies would not have withstood the pressure of...