The hand that rocks the cradle — and cradles the phone, and sweeps the floor, and writes the memo and meets the deadline — doesn't have time to reach out and save the world.

And I remember like, when you see someone you haven't seen in a while, you want to hug them, and I remember trying to reach out to my ex-husband, and he would not take my hand.

The tone changed with his successor, Gerhard Schröder, who made it clear that Germany would not reach for its cheque book every time the European Union put out its hand.