Back in early 2010 former DA leader Tony Leon was still finding his feet as our ambassador in Buenos Aires, Argentina. For reasons I’m still not sure about, but for which I’m eternally grateful, he invited myself and two other editors — Mondli Makhanya and Tim du Plessis — to visit.

Leon is a brilliant networker and the highlight of the trip for me was an early meeting with Martin Redrado, an imperious and deeply intelligent man who had just days earlier resigned after six years as president of the Argentine central bank. He had tried and failed to stop the country’s then president, Christina Kirchner, from getting her hands on the country’s foreign exchange reserves to pay off public debt and keep funds rolling into her populist programmes...