Don Cordoba's bulletin to the Almarian Chamber of Commerce, circulated Friday before the pre-session, was read in the merchants' rooms of Almaria Vella with the attention the Proprietor's signatures command. The argument, set out under the heading "A Fog of Stability," is that the corridor surcharges and the quarantine at berth seven are being treated, by the Government and by the Opposition alike, as weather — as conditions to be endured — rather than as decisions to be made.

"Markets hate fog," the bulletin opens, and the sentence is doing more work than it appears to. Cork shippers, olive oil houses, and the light manufacturing concerns of the northern coast — the sectors named in the Chamber's own first-exposure list last week — have seen counterparty deadlines unmoved by the armed incidents in the eastern basin. The bills will be presented on the original dates. The ships may or may not arrive on them.

The Proprietor's position, stated plainly, is that the Fuel Stabilisation Reserve as drafted leaves too much discretion in too few hands, and that the Monday vote should be taken with the Sunday sanitation report in full view rather than in summary. He does not ask for deferral. He asks for clarity — a distinction the Chamber's older members will recognise as the one Don Cordoba has been drawing, in one register or another, since the spring.

His bulletin closes with a line that has already travelled: that a Kingdom which cannot price its own risk will find the risk priced for it elsewhere. The remark was circulating in the harbour rooms by Friday evening.