It is a gripping tale of high geopolitics and low cunning, and it is all about who gets to sit where. The saga of power within the International Monetary Fund, which has unfolded in infinitesimal increments for years in the manner of a Tolstoyan familial saga, has suddenly become a Stieg Larsson race-against-time thriller. The prizes at stake are the 24 seats on the fund’s executive board.

Governments have been talking for years about giving emerging market countries a firmer grasp on the steering wheel of global governance. Last month the US pulled off a neat procedural trick to force a decision about reorganising the constituencies of countries, each of which is represented on the board by an executive director, by November 1. The fund’s 187 member governments are now scrambling to act.

The losers will be mainly the smaller European countries. Europe now occupies nine seats, a share not matched by its portion of the global economy. Officials are wrestling with possible permutations, essentially turning the institution’s governance into a giant game of sudoku.